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Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 09:53:22 -0400
From: Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com>
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Subject: Re: Beginer problem: variable array size
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Date: 2002-09-23T09:53:22-04:00
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tmoran@acm.org wrote:
 > using
>   List : array(1 .. 8*3600) of Integer;
> and a better than quadratic sort is probably much simpler and more
> reasonable than a (pretend) "no limit".

In modern computing environments, programs that take input
from the user are easily hooked up to take input from other
programs or files instead, so working on the assumption that
the program will be used only by a human typist is foolish.
The professor probably has files of input numbers that will
be fed to each submitted program. I'll bet one of them is
very large, to test the input size limit even if the sort
won't complete in a reasonable amount of time.

Furthermore, if you are going to have an arbitrary limit,
you have to provide the extra code to handle the case of
the limit being exceeded. I suppose you could just range
over the size of the array and ignore any extra input. This
is exactly the kind of silently wrong behavior I was talking
about.

And further yet, why do you think you get to rewrite the
given requirements just because they don't suit the style of
your favorite programming language?