exponential time

Nothing to see here :) Exponential time is sometimes confused with quadratic time, however.

Perhaps we need a page somewhere that discusses performance in a more abstract way.

For example, there is a hierarchy of performance metrics:

  • Constant time - O(1)
  • Linear time - O(n)
  • Quadratic time - O(n**2)
  • Polynomial time
  • Exponential time
  • ?

Some Tcl operations are likely to fall into these categories in a predictable way, and some not. It might be interesting to categorize some of the dict, list, and array operations to see how they behave.


Category Performance