"Chris Mellon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Better hand in your computer, then. You're never going to find a > situation where the environment won't affect the running time of your > algorithms.
The environment may affect the running time by an additive or linear multiplicative constant but it should never turn an O(n) algorithm into an O(n**2) one. > For the record, the python GC is generational. This is a case of a > default heuristic giving pathological behavior in a corner case, not > anything broken about the design of the python GC. No, it is broken, per discussion on a comp.compilers/comp.lang.functional thread this week. The notion of using a generational collector was to collect less and less frequently for older and older generations (e.g. doubling the amount of allocation between generations) but the usual solution is apparently to increase the heap size by some multiplicative factor when GC fails to free enough memory. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
