Ada-based Primer in Big-Oh Notation

Ada-based Primer in Big-Oh Notation

[Rick]

In preparing a tutorial on binary trees I am looking for an
introductory article on Big-Oh Notation.  The NIST article at
http://www.itl.nist.gov/div897/sqg/dads/HTML/bigOnotation.html
is, as expected, excellent - if you are comfortable with mathematics.
The students at whom this tutorial is aimed struggle with mathematics,
and would be much more comfortable with Rob Bell's article at
http://rob-bell.net/2009/06/a-beginners-guide-to-big-o-notation/.

Unfortunately, the examples in Rob's article are not in Ada.

Can anyone point me to a tutorial at a similar level to Rob's in which
Ada examples are used?

Thanks

Re: Ada-based Primer in Big-Oh Notation

[John McCormick]

> Can anyone point me to a tutorial at a similar level to Rob's in which
> Ada examples are used?

Hi Rick!

Section 5.4 of my book, Ada Plus Data Structures (Dale and McCormick,
2007), discusses various ways to compare implementations.  That
discussion includes an introduction to Big-O and textural descriptions
of the common orders of magnitude. After this introduction, the Big-O
of each algorithm developed in the book is discussed.  As the material
is spread out throughout the book, organizing it into a single
tutorial would take some effort.

This is our students' first exposure to Big-O.  They see it again in
several other classes.  It seems to take several spirals through the
concept adding more details each time for Big-O to sink in.

It would not be difficult to translate Rob's examples into Ada.

John