Re: A question: Is 200,000 element array worth sorting and search?

On  5 May 2008 at  0:13, Richard Heathfield wrote:
> mike-yue said:
>
>> All very good answers. many thanks for you guys,
>> In a word, the Liner Search is the cheapest method to search. the
>> other two are complicated and expensive.
>
> Whilst your claim is true, it is meaningless. Linear search is a search 
> technique. The other two are sorting techniques. It's tempting to say
that 
> you're comparing apples with oranges, but it's more like comparing
apples 
> with October.

I think it's pretty obvious to anyone who isn't so literal-minded that
he stops with a syntax error at the first place where most humans would
be happy to read between the lines that implicit in the question is:
would you rather linearly search a list, or first sort it and then
perform a binary search?

To which the answer depends primarily on *how many* searches you're
going to perform.