On Aug 30, 6:03 am, a...@pythoncraft.com (Aahz) wrote: > That reminds me: one co-worker (who really should have known better ;-) > had the impression that sets were O(N) rather than O(1). Although > writing that off as a brain-fart seems appropriate, it's also the case > that the docs don't really make that clear, it's implied from requiring > elements to be hashable. Do you agree that there should be a comment?
There probably ought to be a HOWTO or FAQ entry on algorithmic complexity that covers classes and functions where the algorithms are interesting. That will concentrate the knowledge in one place where performance is a main theme and where the various alternatives can be compared and contrasted. I think most users of sets rarely read the docs for sets. The few lines in the tutorial are enough so that most folks "just get it" and don't read more detail unless they attempting something exotic. Our docs have gotten somewhat voluminous, so it's unlikely that adding that particular needle to the haystack would have cured your colleague's "brain-fart" unless he had been focused on a single document talking about the performance characteristics of various data structures. Raymond Raymond -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
