From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,9b30240b5a381bbf X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-08-25 18:56:41 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board? Date: 25 Aug 2002 18:56:40 -0700 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <5ee5b646.0208251756.379529c5@posting.google.com> References: <5ee5b646.0208231236.1d10d745@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 209.101.126.29 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1030327001 23234 127.0.0.1 (26 Aug 2002 01:56:41 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 26 Aug 2002 01:56:41 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:28403 Date: 2002-08-26T01:56:41+00:00 List-Id: tmoran@acm.org wrote in message news:... > > b) people quoting entire messages all the time. The most aggravating > > is when you get two people doing it at one another and generating > > quadratic amounts of > > quoted junk. > This is wrong. It's exponential. Oh dear! Time for an elementary lesson in math :-) (well actually in computer science, you need to be able to do this sort of thing to do elementary complexity analysis of algorithms) Let's suppose that everyone adds 10 lines and quotes everything before then we have message lengths that are 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Each message contains one copy (only) of everything that has been sent before (not multiple copies). I trust that is obvious In other words the size of message N is 10N lines So the size of messages grows only linearly But, by elementary summing of an arithmetic series, the total amount of space occupied by the first N messages will be (10 + 10N)/2 * N = (10N + 10N**2) / 2 The quadratic term dominates and the result is asymptotically 5 * N**2 which is called quadratic. The casual use of exponential to talk of things that grow fast is something that technical people should avoid!