Yes, that is interesting, in theory. In practice, this unexpected part of my project is a very annoying bottleneck. ;) Luckily, mine is a very rough shoreline (taken off a grid), and so is not really scale-independent.
Tristan, do you have any hints for dealing with messy dat sets? I am tracing points along a shoreline, and your program gets it almost right, just a few places where it joins points across large distances that should not be connected. Something like 'if distance between points>X, redo' in some way or other.
