Yeah, agreed, the real problem does not occur in mere math calculations. The problem occurs when you liberally allocate a dynamically-sized list of dynamically

Yeah, agreed, the real problem does not occur in mere math calculations. The problem occurs when you liberally allocate a dynamically-sized list of dynamically-sized lists (possibly of a union of different data types). That situation will always throw up an engineering trade-off between memory size, algorithm performance, and code complexity. The solution will usually consist in severely constraining and restricting runaway flexibility in the data structure being managed, simply because it won't badly affect real-user use cases. Once in a while the strategy will exact a serious and real price anyway, but hey, you cannot please everybody.