[Python-Dev] Document performance requirements?

[Nick Coghlan]

Jason Orendorff wrote:
> On 7/21/06, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> However, I'm also struggling to think of a case other than list vs 
>> deque where
>> the choice of a builtin or standard library data structure would be 
>> dictated
>> by big-O() concerns.
> 
> OK, but that doesn't mean the information is unimportant.  +1 on
> making this something of a priority.  People looking for this info
> should find it in the obvious place.  Some are unobvious. (How fast is
> dict.__eq__ on average? Worst case?)

Agreed, but there's more to doing that than just writing down the O() implied 
by the current CPython implementation - it's up to Guido to decide which of 
the constraints are part of the language definition, and which are 
implementation accidents (e.g. CPython's list.sort() operation was stable for 
at least one release before GvR made stability part of the definition of the 
method at the language level).

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
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