Sybren Stuvel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I don't know enough about Python internals, but the suggested > > solutions all seem to involve scanning bigList. Can this presumably > > linear operation be avoided by using dict or similar to find all > > occurrences of smallist items in biglist and then deleting those > > occurrences? > > And how would that beat O(n)? Every element of bigList has to be > scanned at one point, either to compare it to every earlier element in > bigList and eliminate it, or to compare it to every element in > smallList.
Maybe the application should use sets instead of lists for these collections. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
