wordplay vs. an

[Joey Hess <joey@kite.ml.org>]

I just noticed the "an" program in debian. I maintain wordplay. Both
programs generate anagrams.

It seems to me, that an is a superior program:

	1. It uses a standard dictionary. (wordplay is required by 
		its copyright to be packaged with a special word list 
		file, though it can be configured to use a different one.)

	2. It's faster. (2x faster anagramming "debian gnu linux", claims
		of being 10x faster in some cases.)

	3. It ouputs in lower case, wheras wordplay outputs in hard to scan
		uppercase. Ok, this is trivial :-)

	4. It's GNU copyrighted.

	5. In a trial using the same dictionary, an found more anagrams than
		wordplay did. This is the one main reason I find an superior 
		-- wordplay doesn't find all anagrams.

However, wordplay does have a couple of advantages:

	1. Its word list file is larger, which is one reason it's slower. 
		But this means it finds more anagrams (wordplay found 3094 
		anagrams of "debian gnu linux", an only 2681) But see #5
		above.

	2. It has a few options that an lacks.

	3. I spent a few hours writing a man page for the thing, and I hate 
		to waste my effort. :-)

	4. It has a better name than "an". Programs whouldn't be named after
		common parts of speech, it's confusing. :-)

My feeling is that debian has room for two anagrams generators, but there's
not a lot of difference between them, and an is superior. I'd just as soon 
drop wordplay from the distribution, unless someone has a strong desire to 
keep it. So, if someone would like to keep wordplay in the distribution, 
please speak up.

-- 
See shy Joe.