That interesting notation used to describe how long a loop will take.

[MRAB]

On 04/10/2010 19:38, Tobiah wrote:
> It gets used here frequently, but not
> having majored in programming, I'm not
> familiar with it.  One might say:
>
> Don't do it that way, it will result in O(n**2)!
>
> Or something like that.  I read this to mean
> that the execution time varies with the square
> of the number of iterations, or items being sorted
> etc..
>
> I want to google this, but I'm not sure what
> keywords to use.  Is there a wikipedia article about this
> subject?  I imagine that it has a concise name.
>
It's called the "Big O notation".