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> The article doesn't seem to consider real life practicality enough. It considers it plenty for an article in the category "neat trick/wrinkle of processor ca
by asdfasgasdgasdg 7y ago
> The article doesn't seem to consider real life practicality enough.
It considers it plenty for an article in the category "neat trick/wrinkle of processor caches and pipelining you may not have known/thought about to its limit." If you're actually doing binary searches on sets large enough to where this would matter, most often some kind of hash based solution is going to be preferable anyway, because of its much higher degree of cache efficiency and better asymptotic performance. That's not this article's purpose, though. Not every article is a tutorial.
- WhitneyLand 7y agoWho said it should be a tutorial? I agree on that point it's not a how to, and a tutorial is probably a contradiction for the topic. That doesn't mean it can't discuss practicalities. Plenty of advanced papers, blog posts, documentation, experiments, whatever, discuss engineering realities because they feel like it. The reality is some things are less intuitive and require more outside the problem thinking than others. If someone is writing about how binary trees work alone, not concurrent programming as well as is done here, there's little point to considering applications because it's simply useful to know and apply the concept so often. However this one is an edge case, and even when you need it I would doubt many seasoned engineers wouldn't still benefit from contextual considerations from the author.