From: Guido van Rossum Date: Mon, 16 Dec 1996 03:32:39 +0000 (+0000) Subject: Change comment about MINSIZE -- 10 is optimal for Python. X-Git-Tag: v1.5a1~744 X-Git-Url: https://granicus.if.org/sourcecode?a=commitdiff_plain;h=cc15b42e5919548e8d7008776f4c87f2267a00b3;p=python Change comment about MINSIZE -- 10 is optimal for Python. --- diff --git a/Objects/listobject.c b/Objects/listobject.c index a985aa33ce..2fb67b9883 100644 --- a/Objects/listobject.c +++ b/Objects/listobject.c @@ -630,9 +630,12 @@ insertionsort(array, size, compare) } /* MINSIZE is the smallest array we care to partition; smaller arrays - are sorted using a straight insertion sort (above). You may want - to play with this to tune it for your system. It must be at least - 2; more than 20 probably doesn't make sense. */ + are sorted using a straight insertion sort (above). It must be at + least 2 for the quicksort implementation to work. Assuming that + comparisons are more expensive than everything else (and this is a + good assumption for Python), it should be 10, which is the cutoff + point: quicksort requires more comparisons than insertion sort for + smaller arrays. */ #define MINSIZE 10 /* STACKSIZE is the size of our work stack. A rough estimate is that