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From: det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG (Derek E. Terveer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: Permuted indices
Message-ID: <1990Jul17.004054.753@hawkmoon.MN.ORG>
Date: 17 Jul 90 00:40:54 GMT
Organization: Home System (One of the Eternal Champions)
Lines: 26

In article <1235@s8.Morgan.COM> amull@Morgan.COM (Andrew P. Mullhaupt) writes:
> In article <1990Jul12.044550.19213@ico.isc.com>, rcd@ico.isc.com (Dick Dunn) writes:
> > [...]  Seems pretty obvious to me:  Think of useful words that might have
> > something to do with the topic, look them up until you find something that
> > helps.  It's far more useful than the traditional index in one particular
> > sense: context.  For example, if you want to know how to do something to a
> > directory, it's easy to go to "directory" in the perverted index and scan
>
> More useful? Not in my experience. A permuted index is a good way to
> inflate the number of references you have to read through to get your
> hit.  [...]  I think the reason is that Bermuda indices
> put you in the linear search mode a lot more than the normal indices,
> where you stay in binary search, and fewer page faults are involved.

Huh?  Perhaps you need to re-examine the format of the permuted index; it is
alphabetical and you may therefore circumvent the linear search.  Your comments
so far seem to imply that you must spend a *great* deal of time looking up
English words in a dictionary as well.

If i want to find something in the man pages i always look in the permuted
index first and i frequently wonder why other vendors (not just for Unix
either!) don't include such a useful beast in their documentation efforts...

derek
-- 
Derek Terveer		det@hawkmoon.MN.ORG