Surprising (for me) benchmark results...

[Andrew Dalke]

Rainer Deyke:
>Disk access is O(N); sorting is typically O(N log N).  Therefore as the
>number of entries in the file size increases, the time taken by the sort
>becomes more significant and the time taken by disk access becomes less
>significant.

If you want to consider things that way then you have to worry
about Python's list extension, which last I heard was O(N**2),
that is,

  data = []
  i = 0
  while i < N:
    data.append(i)

is an O(N**2) operation instead of O(N).  (Although
  data = list(range(N))
should be O(N) :)

But the likelyhood of this being a problem is low.  BTW, this was
discussed to death last year so please read the archives for
pros and cons to the current behaviour.

                    Andrew
                    dalke at acm.org