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

On May 5, 3:43=A0am, James Harris <james.harri...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On 5 May, 01:26, Keith Thompson <ks...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > mike-yue <needpass...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>
> ...
>
> > > I think it is useless for 99% programmer jobs, unfortunately it's
> > > always been asked. Once a interviewer asked me to explain the
> > > algorithmic complexity of quick sort!
>
> > And this was a problem? =A0That's certainly something I'd expect any
> > good programmer to know. =A0If you're going to be writing code that
does=

> > sorting and searching, and you don't know this stuff, there's an
> > excellent chance your code is going to be unacceptable slow.
>
> > (Quicksort is O(N log N) best case and average case; a straightforward
> > implementation is O(N**2) worst case, but it can be made O(N log N)
> > with a little tweaking.)
>
> It's not difficult to /state/ the complexity of quicksort (assuming
> one remembers it) but it is another thing to /explain/ it.
>
> --

agree with you. it is more difficult to explain if you learned the
theory in other language, e.g. in Chinese.
I was wondering if it is a easy thing to explain algorithmic
complexity for a programmer whose mother language is English(excluding
the geeks who are crazy about algorithmic).