retard: > 0. use a better algorithm (the big O notation matters, like in this case)
This is a big mistake, because: - Optimizing before you know what to optimize is premature optimization. The profiler is one of the best tools to find what to optimize. - Often data structures and algorithms are a trade-off between different needs. So "better" is not absolute, it's problem-specific, and the profiler helps to find such specific problems. And regarding the problem of searching in a sequence of items, if the sequence is small (probably up to 10 or 20 if the items are integers, the language is a low level one and the associative array is not very efficient), a linear search or a binary search is often faster. --------------- dsimcha: >While writing assembly is notoriously hard (I've never even tried for anything >non-trivial), Using well certain Java frameworks is harder :-) Bye, bearophile
