Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: > On the other hand notes could be added for various oddities according to > experience. For example that for sets up to 10(?) elements, a list would > probably be better because of the hashing overhead.
That's the sort of thing that tends to be *very* implementation dependent -- not just between CPython and others, but between different releases of CPython. > Hmmm, the first thing that comes to mind is prepending an item in a list > which is small and seems nice, but is O(n) I think! Yeah, there's no substitute for having at least a rough idea of how the object you're using is implemented, e.g. array vs. linked list. This kind of very basic information is something that I think ought to be documented, and some guarantees made in the language definition. For example, I think a Python implementation that implemented lists as linked lists would make many people unhappy, as their algorithms suddenly went from O(n**m) to O(n**(m+1)) without anyone telling them. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
