In article <mailman.239.1283257496.29448.python-l...@python.org>, Jerry Hill <malaclyp...@gmail.com> wrote: >On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Aahz <a...@pythoncraft.com> wrote: >> >> Possibly; IMO, people should not need to run timeit to determine basic >> algorithmic speed for standard Python datatypes. > >http://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity takes a stab at it. IIRC, >last time this came up, there was some resistance to making promises >about time complexity in the official docs, since that would make >those numbers part of the language, and thus binding on other >implementations.
I'm thoroughly aware of that page and updated it yesterday to make it easier to find. ;-) However, I think there are some rock-bottom basic guarantees we can make regardless of implementation. Does anyone seriously think that an implementation would be accepted that had anything other than O(1) for index access into tuples and lists? Dicts that were not O(1) for access with non-pathological hashing? That we would accept sets having O() performance worse than dicts? I suggest that we should agree on these guarantees and document them in the core. -- Aahz (a...@pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "...if I were on life-support, I'd rather have it run by a Gameboy than a Windows box." --Cliff Wells -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
