I recently discovered that several of my (programming) friends know no string search algorithms other than the naïve left-to-right, one character at a time scan. There are much better algorithms out there, among them the one by Boyer-Moore.

When I first heard about Boyer-Moore, it made me realize how easy it is to overlook opportunities for optimization – I hadn’t thought it feasible to speed up string search, either.

In order to allow others to see the beauty of it, I made a little CLIM visualizer app for string search algorithms, to use in a little intro session to good string matching code. Get the code here, load it with McCLIM installed (preferably through quicklisp), and run (run-frame-top-level (make-application-frame 'visualizer)).

Edit 2017-11-19: moved the source code to gist (as paste.lisp.org was disabled due to abuse of the service; the original link went here); updated the install prerequisite instructions to point to quicklisp.