Subject: Re: Problems with EQUALP hash tables and Arrays
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/05/28
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3136843901742945@naggum.no>

* Lieven Marchand <mal@bewoner.dma.be>
| I think it would make more sense for the standard to demand of
| implementors to document the expected performance of their implementation.

  this would mean that no implemntation would ever be conforming to the
  standard, and reasonable people would shrug off that requirement, because
  it is actually an unreasonable thing to request people to do.  the reason
  for support channels back to a vendor is to be able to ask when you need
  to know.  perhaps this is foreign to people who don't like commercial
  vendors in the programming language market, but the support I get from
  Franz Inc when I need it is tremendously valuable.

| Alternatively, you end up with requirements that are so loose as to be
| almost meaningless.  The C++ standard demands certain performance bounds
| in terms of O(f(n)) of the STL library components, but since the
| implementation is not required to support objects or arrays above a
| certain size any vendor can claim O(1) performance of everything by
| choosing a suitably large constant.

  I don't think you know what the big-O notation means, but I'm sure the
  people who read the C++ standard don't either, so it's probably a useful
  requirement for that community.

#:Erik
-- 
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century