IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> wrote on 06/29/2006 04:56:51 PM:
> >I'll hire a kid with a fresh CS degree any day, whether he's got MVS > >experience or not. There's some COBOL coder-beavers around here with > >years of MVS behind them, but have no idea what O(n) means, and they > >produce some truly wretched code. > > As someone who has coded in COBOL since 1963 (and Honeywell FACT > before that), written JES exits in Assembler and used various 4GLs, I > admit that I haven't a clue as to what you mean by O(n) in this > context. I still may not after you explain but I was able to sell > myself as a technically capable person for much of my career (after I > went from complete immaturity to only partial). "Order" is a measure of computational complexity. O(n) for an algorithm means than the amount of computation for n elements is K * n, where K is a constant - i.e. the amount of computation is proportional to the number of elements. Examples of Order for some common algorithms: O(n) - searching a list of n elements O(n ** 2) - bubble sort of n elements O(n * log(n)) - heap sort of n elements Jim Mulder z/OS System Test IBM Corp. Poughkeepsie, NY ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
