[Python-Dev] sum(...) limitation (original) (raw)

Alexander Belopolsky alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com
Tue Aug 12 02:50:28 CEST 2014

On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 8:19 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

Teaching users the difference between linear time operations and quadratic ones isn't about purity, it's about passing along a fundamental principle of algorithm scalability.

I would understand if this was done in reduce(operator.add, ..) which indeed spells out the choice of an algorithm, but why sum() should be O(N) for numbers and O(N**2) for containers? Would a python implementation that, for example, optimizes away 0's in sum(list_of_numbers) be non-compliant with some fundamental principle? -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/attachments/20140811/ed835d07/attachment-0001.html>

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