> What I was hoping someone had was a function that could find the substring
> runs in something less than a strlen1*strlen2 number of operations and a
> numerically sane way of representing the similarity or difference.
Acually, it is more like strlen1*strlen2*N, where N is the number of valid
runs.
Unless someone has a GREAT algorithm, I think it will always be at least
strlen1*strlen2. The amount of processing for N is the question. Is N *
(strlen1*strlen2) less than sorting an array of N elements, scanning
through those elements and eliminating duplicate character matches?
Depending on the max value of N, I could save all the runs, sort by max
length, then exclude based on overlapp, but it isn't clear that this is a
performance win unless the strings are long, even then, I'm not completely
convinced as N still has some strlen ramifications for removing
duplicates.
