Paul Rubin wrote: > 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. What would sets do for me over lists?
Chaz -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
