[taeric]

You don't seem to be disagreeing. The point was that you need to know which properties matter to your application before you can truly decide where you should worry about emphasis.

But, for those that want a good example of what you are talking about, it seems to mirror the recent post by Carmack regarding ray tracing. If I recall, the point was that, though ray tracing is better in O terms, it has an outrageous constant factor.

[andreasvc]

I was disagreeing with the notion that you can only say which algorithm to use if you know the specific application. There are general trade-offs between algorithms which hold independent of any specific application.

[taeric]

But the thought is that the specific application will determine which trade-offs are acceptable and/or applicable. So... I'm still not sure how you are disagreeing.

Now, you can list out the various tradeoffs easily enough. And some algorithms are superior to others, I would imagine. However, which to use and the impact it will have on an application depend more on the application than the datastructure.

Or, am I completely off my rocker?

[_delirium]

Another wrinkle is that the constant factors can be data-dependent: which data structure to choose can heavily depend on the distribution of data you typically see.