On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 2:01 AM, Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> wrote: > Analogy: how big a box is required to hold a pair of shoes? In a purely > theoretical sense we might say O(S) where S is the shoe size, treating > shoe size as an arbitrary independent variable. But in the real world, > shoe size is controlled by the size of human feet, which is bounded by a > constant for biological reasons. You don't have to consider shoes the > size of Jupiter. So it is O(1).
By that argument, everything is amortized O(1), because there's a limit on every variable. You can't possibly be working with a data set greater than the total sum of storage space in the entire world. That still doesn't mean that bubble sort and heap sort are equivalently efficient. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
