Good correction, but a small second nit. > sometimes they're just plain faster Not faster for sufficiently large N (by definition). But your general point is

Good correction, but a small second nit. > sometimes they're just plain faster Not faster for sufficiently large N (by definition). But your general point is correct. I've best seen this expressed in Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming [0], Rule 3: Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. [0] http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/pike.html