On 13/10/2010 21:11, Steven Schveighoffer wrote: <snip>
No, what is suggested is that we build the complexity guarantees into the interface. For example, if you had a List interface, and it could only guarantee O(n) performance for get, you'd call it e.g. slowGet(), to signify it's a slow operation, and define get to signify a fast operation. Similarly, 'in' is defined to be fast, so it has no business being a function on an array.
<snip>
And make get assert(false) if a fast get isn't implementable? I think this is bug-prone - somebody may use it forgetting that it won't work on all List implementations, and then the algorithm will refuse at runtime to work at all rather than degrading gracefully to something that does.
But something else that would be useful is methods in the interface to tell which operations are fast and which are slow.
Stewart.
