On 9/1/2010 10:57 PM, ru...@yahoo.com wrote:
So while you may "think" most people rarely read the docs for basic language features and objects (I presume you don't mean to restrict your statement to only sets), I and most people I know *do* read them. And when read them I expect them, as any good reference documentation does, to completely and accurately describe the behavior of the item I am reading about. If big-O performance is deemed an intrinsic behavior of an (operation of) an object, it should be described in the documentation for that object.
However, big-O performance is intentionally NOT so deemed. And I have and would continue to argue that it should not be, for multiple reasons.
Performance is a feature of implementations, and I think they should be documented.
This is not to say that a performance HOWTO or FAQ in addition to the reference manual would not be good.
I have writing a draft of such for CPython on my personal todo list. -- Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
