On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 8:19 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncogh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Teaching users the difference between linear time operations and quadratic > ones isn't about purity, it's about passing along a fundamental principle > of algorithm scalability. I would understand if this was done in reduce(operator.add, ..) which indeed spells out the choice of an algorithm, but why sum() should be O(N) for numbers and O(N**2) for containers? Would a python implementation that, for example, optimizes away 0's in sum(list_of_numbers) be non-compliant with some fundamental principle?
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