Time complexity of dictionary insertions
Tres Seaver
tseaver at palladion.com
Fri Apr 23 09:05:09 EDT 1999
tim_one at email.msn.com wrote:
>
> In article <371F2125.BEC5F892 at fzi.de>,
> Oliver Ciupke <ciupke at fzi.de> wrote:
> > As I understood from the Python documentation, dictionaries are
> > implemented as extensible hash tables.
>
> Yes.
>
> > What I didn't find either in the references or in the FAQ is: what is
> > the actual time complexity for an insertion into a dictionary?
>
> Min O(1), Max O(N), Ave O(1). If the hash function is doing a terrible job
> (e.g. maps every key to the same hash value), make those all O(N).
C++ STL junkies know this as "amortized constant time".
=========================================================
Tres Seaver tseaver at palladion.com 713-523-6582
Palladion Software http://www.palladion.com
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