#2986: document SequenceMatcher heuristic.

diff --git a/Doc/library/difflib.rst b/Doc/library/difflib.rst
index d749e14582953d0e33eccab5e4c42dcc21edec0a..9cd76e36419c63806ddd095fb2283d53c9595f7b 100644 (file)
--- a/Doc/library/difflib.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/difflib.rst
@@ -37,6 +37,11 @@ diffs. For comparing directories and files, see also, the :mod:`filecmp` module.
    complicated way on how many elements the sequences have in common; best case
    time is linear.
 
+   **Heuristic:** To speed-up matching, items that appear more than 1% of the
+   time in sequences of at least 200 items are treated as junk.  This has the
+   unfortunate side-effect of giving bad results for sequences constructed from
+   a small set of items.  An option to turn off the heuristic will be added to a
+   future version.
 
 .. class:: Differ