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Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming
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Algorithm complexity

Using a software library is a matter of trust. You trust the implementers to not only provide correct functionality, but you also hope that the functions execute as efficiently as possible. It s better to write your own loops than to use algorithms that degrade performance.

To guarantee quality library implementations, the C++ Standard not only specifies what an algorithm should do, but how fast it should do it and sometimes how much space it should use. Any algorithm that does not meet the performance requirements does not conform to the standard. The measure of an algorithm s operational efficiency is called its complexity.

When possible, the standard specifies the exact number of operation counts an algorithm should use. The count_if( ) algorithm, for example, returns the number of elements in a sequence satisfying a given predicate. The following call to count_if( ), if applied to a sequence of integers similar to the examples earlier in this chapter, yields the number of integer elements that are greater than 15:

size_t n = count_if(a, a + SIZE, gt15);
 

Since count_if( ) must look at every element exactly once, it is specified to make a number of comparisons exactly equal to the number of elements in the sequence. The copy( ) algorithm has the same specification.

Other algorithms can be specified to take at most a certain number of operations. The find( ) algorithm searches through a sequence in order until it encounters an element equal to its third argument:

int* p = find(a, a + SIZE, 20);
 

It stops as soon as the element is found and returns a pointer to that first occurrence. If it doesn t find one, it returns a pointer one position past the end of the sequence (a+SIZE in this example). So find() makes at most a number of comparisons equal to the number of elements in the sequence.

Sometimes the number of operations an algorithm takes cannot be measured with such precision. In such cases, the standard specifies the algorithm s asymptotic complexity, which is a measure of how the algorithm behaves with large sequences compared to well-known formulas. A good example is the sort( ) algorithm, which the standard says takes approximately n log n comparisons on average (n is the number of elements in the sequence).[87] Such complexity measures give a feel for the cost of an algorithm and at least give a meaningful basis for comparing algorithms. As you ll see in the next chapter, the find( ) member function for the set container has logarithmic complexity, which means that the cost of searching for an element in a set will, for large sets, be proportional to the logarithm of the number of elements. This is much smaller than the number of elements for large n, so it is always better to search a set by using its find( ) member function rather than by using the generic find( ) algorithm.

Thinking in C++ Vol 2 - Practical Programming
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   Reproduced courtesy of Bruce Eckel, MindView, Inc. Design by Interspire