Speed up a slow loop

[Alex Tweedly]

On 06/03/2022 22:56, J. Landman Gay via use-livecode wrote:
>
> The board walk took 179 ms for all 108 words because I ditched my old, 
> juvenile, inefficient code and swiped yours. :) As Bill requested, 
> I've marked all the stuff I used with credits for the people who 
> suggested or provided code, so you're in there. The two most impactful 
> changes were your board walk and Quentin's filtered dictionary idea, 
> but there are also other improvements.

Oh, well, if you've got the fast boardwalk code in there anyway, that 
opens up another possibility (with one caveat).

The boardwalk will find all valid words on the board. So that list of 
words can be used as the "dictionary" for the user's guesses - and now 
you have a "dictionary" of only a few hundred words, rather than than 
the many thousands of either the original or the filtered dictionaries.

And it's worth saying that the fast boardwalk only explores those 
potential words that are on the board, so there's no need to filter the 
dictionary for it.

The caveat - a user guess which isn't in the word list found by the 
boardwalk can be either "not a word" or "a word, but not present on the 
board", and you don't know which. If your UI needs to distinguish 
between those cases, you'd need to do another step of checking these 
(hopefully very few) failure cases against the full dictionary.

Alex.