On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 09:10:11PM +0200, Oliver Bandel wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 01:29:06PM -0500, John Goerzen wrote:
> > On Fri, Apr 23, 2004 at 02:51:41PM +0200, Xavier Leroy wrote:
> > > With your specification (no repetitions in the list), that function
> > > would run in quadratic time, which is a sure sign that lists aren't
> > > the right data structure here.  (More generally speaking, "lists
> > > without repetitions" is almost always the wrong data structure.)
> > 
> > But perhaps you don't really care how fast it runs, since your entire
> > program consumes about 1/10 of a CPU second anyway?
> 
> Depends on number of keys...
> 
> n ^ 2  is less when n is low,
> n = 10 and n = 10000 seems not to matter much...
> but 10^2 and 10000^2 are a differrence that matters a lot!

OK, but why should we eliminate a useful function because 1% of uses
of it will be slow?

Make a note in the docs (like that notes that are there already that say
"this function is not tail-recursive") and put it in for those that will
find it useful.

On another note, I really don't understand why hashtables permit
duplicate keys anyway; it just doesn't seem useful to me.  All my
Hashtbl code uses Hashtbl.replace....

-- John

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