N*log(N) doesn't exist (Re: [RFC] Vector (string?) growth...)

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Paolo Carlini <pcarlini@suse.de> writes:

| And all of this raises another, even more general issue: the standard talks
| about Big-Oh notations which, ultimately, if I'm not wrong, are defined as
| _limits_ for N->+inf.

True.

| Therefore, for every possible _finite_ N, how we can possibly assess if
| an implementation is conforming without looking at the source code?

I have always thought that those complexity requirements were good
pratical hints to implementors as what minimum efficiency their common
sense should guide them to aim at.  It looks like "common sense" was
not well defined ;-)

-- Gaby