[racket] Looking for feedback on code style

From: Robby Findler (robby at eecs.northwestern.edu)
Date: Tue Sep 14 11:15:38 EDT 2010

I think that racket guarantees that no vector has more elements than
the size of the largest fixnum (to support optimizations).

Also, Jos: you might want to use time-apply.

Robby

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Stephen Bloch <sbloch at adelphi.edu> wrote:
>
> On Sep 14, 2010, at 10:37 AM, Jos Koot wrote:
>
>> The following measurement shows O(n).
>> But O(n) = O(C+n) where C may be a big number.
>
> More relevantly, O(n) is hard to distinguish experimentally from O(n log n).  In particular, all the sizes you seem to tried are well within a machine word, so I would expect O(n) behavior in that region (for reasons that other people have already pointed out).
>
> Big-O notation is about what happens _in the long run_, as you "approach infinity".  Any experimental analysis will only tell you about a finite region, so it can't confirm or deny any big-O estimate.  Of course, if your "finite region" covers all the problem sizes you will ever realistically want to solve, then an experimental analysis is actually more informative than a big-O estimate.
>
>
>
> Stephen Bloch
> sbloch at adelphi.edu
>
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