From: Falk H. <hue...@in...> - 2004-07-25 16:53:12
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Brian Hurt <bh...@sp...> writes: > Are we willing to slow down the common case to speed up the > exceedingly rare case? This is an interesting question; in my opinion, for a library that strives to set something like a standard: Yes. Absolutely. Because: 1. Experience has taught us that usage patterns that seem weird occur more often than we think. 2. Worst cases which have much worse run times (e. g., O(log n) -> O(n)) can be used for denial of service attacks. 3. If you're really desperate for performance, you're going to implement your own data structure for your special case anyway. However, in most cases, it doesn't really matter that much. -- Falk |