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Date: Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:35:25 -0800
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Subject: Re: Complexity question on Python 3 lists
From: Chris Rebert <clp2@rebertia.com>
To: Franck Ditter <franck@ditter.org>
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On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 10:20 AM, Franck Ditter <franck@ditter.org> wrote:
> What is the cost of calling primes(n) below ? I'm mainly interested in
> knowing if the call to append is O(1), even amortized.
> Do lists in Python 3 behave like ArrayList in Java (if the capacity
> is full, then the array grows by more than 1 element) ?

Yes. Python lists aren't linked lists. list.append() resizes the
underlying array intelligently to give O(1) performance, although I
can't find any guarantee of this in the docs, but it is true in
practice for all major Python implementations.

Cheers,
Chris