Also, while actually ysths solution and my current solution can both be modified to handle variable length string sets I dont think either of us have the time to actually put the changes into place so I would prefer that we stick to fixed length words.
FWIW, my solution will lose efficiency with mixed length words.
I would actually like to see us come up with a module providing all three methods, possibly including variants supporting fixed vs. mixed length (assuming there's at least something that each has as an advantage, of which I'm not sure as regards mine). I'm kind of expecting BrowserUk's to best handle high amounts of fuzz.
Re: packing the return values; I seriously doubt a pack in pure perl is going to be a net win over just returning multiple elements, so I think that would benefit only the
XS solution. It's also a lousy interface for a perl module to use. As far as returning an index goes, I suppose that's possible, but as is my algorithm has no need to keep the array around.
