Big-O notation

[Courageous]

>I believe you are making some unreasonable assumptions here. Remember that 
>if I have an algorithm that is O(N^2) that is really just a shorthand for 
>saying that it will have a running time a*N^2 + b*N * c where a, b, and c 
>are constants but for sufficiently large N only the N^2 term matters.
>Now imagine that you have a program that runs in O(N^2) time and you have 
>10 items. If a is 1 and b is 1000, ...

Ah, the practical optimizer. We encounter so few of these in this day
and age. :-)

C//