| You're getting deep into the realm of data sets that don't fit into a computer. I don't think you're talking about solving the same problems. > Forty years and six orders of magnitude ago we treated a bunch of operations as constant , which is a clever fiction that is blatantly obvious now,but some of you knuckleheads continue to not look at. Most C terms are in fact stair-stepped log(n). Every time log(n) doubles and crosses a threshold, the cost of the operation doubles, and therefore is in log(n), not C. Memory latency hasn't really budged in 25 years and is significantly faster than it was 40 years ago. Pointers have gotten bigger, but they're not that big compared to data and they're only one notch away from the maximum you could ever use in a single computer. Where are we seeing these slowdowns? > I can also guarantee that most data structures can’t even support a googol of records and never will. Some won’t ever support a quintillion records due to complexity A B-tree will do fine. > Memory access, as it turns out, is sqrt(n) Not in real single computers. And if our baseline is 1983 latency, it would take more than unrealistic amounts of circuits and size for the speed-of-light delays to drag modern tech down to equal it, let alone be worse. I agree that actual infinity is impractical, but “zero, one, and out of memory” gives the wrong idea, because it implies you might limit things to the amount of memory currently available or available soon. "Infinity" is better at getting across the idea that your code is not allowed to bake in any limits. |