>>>>> "Raymond" == Raymond Hettinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: Raymond> * in most apps (except for sparse arrays), the initialization time Raymond> for an array is dominated by the time spent actually doing Raymond> something useful with the array (iow, this is an odd place to be Raymond> optimizing)
This brings to mind an old algorithms chestnut (exercise 2.12 in the 1st edition of Aho, Hopcroft & Ullman [1]): If the implementation of an algorithm uses (for simplicity's sake) a square array to represent its data, why are _all_ such algorithms not necessarily O(n^2) due simply to the initialization requirement (supposing a model of computation that counts assignments)? Terry [1] http://www.amazon.com/Analysis-Algorithms-Addison-Wesley-Information-Processing/dp/0201000296 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
