Talk:Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm

The first table ($\delta _{1}$) gives the next offset at which a match could possibly occur given the last (nonmatching) character encountered while comparing the pattern with the text; the second ($\delta _{2}$) gives a similar offset based on the number of characters that matched correctly. When a mismatch occurs, the largest of these two values is used to skip ahead to the next position where a match could potentially occur.

Does anyone know the reason that the somewhat obscure references of $\delta _{1}$ and $\delta _{2}$ are used here? Were those perhaps the way they were referenced in the original publications about the algorithm? I'm replacing this text with a (hopefully!) more straightforward explanation but I'm wondering why they were referenced that way. -- Antaeus Feldspar 05:04, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)