16. The method of claim 15 , further comprising: the second hardware engine performs said (a) and (b) while the first hardware engine scans the input block of characters to produce a next token in the stream.
16. The method of claim 15 , further comprising: the second hardware engine performs said (a) and (b) while the first hardware engine scans the input block of characters to produce a next token in the stream. 17. The method of claim 16 , said maintaining the sorted list further comprises: (c) repeatedly swapping locations of the first and second symbols in the sorted list while the first frequency equals the second frequency and the first symbol is lexically less than the second symbol.