3 ms·

I think the original commenter knows full well what an array is. Vague justifications like "can cause problems" is probably exactly what he's referring to, in

I think the original commenter knows full well what an array is. Vague justifications like "can cause problems" is probably exactly what he's referring to, in fact - people who know that inserting elements into an array is "slow" and end up making large and complex code as a result. Yes, it's O(N) on the length of your code, but the point is that for a couple of megs of text, O(N) is perfectly acceptable. At least on a desktop, that'll fit in L3 cache which these days is around 175GB/sec. Or to put it another way, inserting that single char can probably be done at around 40,000 times per second. Which is faster than I can type, at any rate.

namirez 7y ago
You'd be correct if people used editors for opening only source code files. The problem is that people usually open data files too which can be not only larger than L3 cache, but larger the entire system memory. The magic of a good editor like Vim is the capability to handle such files. The other problem with your comment is the support for Undo operation. Even if you use a flat array, you need a more sophisticated data structure for storing previous changes. Storing a separate array for every single change is not an option.