3 ms·
I would just say "almost always" to cut off the pedants. You do use the same notation to describe the best-case and average-case as well; people just don't care
by mminer237 1y ago
I would just say "almost always" to cut off the pedants. You do use the same notation to describe the best-case and average-case as well; people just don't care about those as often.
- samwho 1y agoI did push up a rewording that hopefully lands better. Fingers crossed.
- jibal 1y agoPejoratively referring to people as "pedants" simply because they know what they are talking about is quite the ad hominem fallacy. As for what people care about, it depends on what they're doing and what they know about the input distribution. If you're concerned about DOS attacks or response time in a game, then worse case is of primary importance. But if you're paying for wall time then you measure a hash table lookup by its O(1) average time, not its O(n) worst case time.