[Tutor] Object oriented design

[Danny Yoo]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2015 at 5:58 PM, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com> wrote:
> On 22/12/15 00:14, jamie hu wrote:
>
>>    Thanks Alan. I was thinking about making a list of objects and search
>>    through it, but wasn't sure if that was right way.
>
> For small numbers of objects( aa few hundreds say) its the easiest option.

If the data is small, it likely doesn't matter too much if you're
using an unsorted list.

For anything larger, but still in-memory, you may eventually want to
start considering the appropriate data structures for the operations
you're performing.  That's the kind of stuff a standard
data-structures/algorithms course talks about.

If we want to support exact lookups by key, a dictionary may be an
appropriate choice.  But we shouldn't immediately discount a sorted
list: binary search might also be appropriate.
(https://docs.python.org/3.1/library/bisect.html).  It's another
design choice that hinges on what operations we want to make go fast.