Skip lists are fascinating!

igoro.com — Skip lists are a fascinating data structure: very simple, and yet have the same asymptotic efficiency as much more complicated AVL trees and red-black trees. In this article, I discuss the asymptotic efficiency of operations on skip lists, the ideas that make them work, and their interesting use cases. And, of course, I give you the source code for a skip list in C#. read more...

add a comment | category: C# | Views: 337

A neat way to express multi-clause 'if' statements in C#, C++ or Java

igoro.com — I stumbled upon a neat trick that works in all C-based languages. By composing ternary conditional operators in a particular way, we can express multi-clause if statements in a surprisingly concise and clean way. read more...

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7 tricks to simplify your programs with LINQ

igoro.com — Ever since I learned about LINQ, I keep discovering new ways to use it to improve my code. Every trick makes my code a little bit faster to write, and a little bit easier to read. This posting summarizes some of the tricks that I came across. I will show you how to use LINQ to: initialize an array, iterate over multiple arrays in a single loop, generate a random sequence, ... read more...

1 comment | category: C# | Views: 646

How to break quicksort

igoro.com — Quicksort usually runs in O(N log N) time, but in special cases, it takes much longer: O(N^2). It is surprisingly easy to force any quicksort implementation to degrade into the quadratic-time behavior. This trick even works against a randomized quicksort! The article demonstrates how the trick works by applying it against the BCL Array.Sort() routine. read more...

add a comment | category: C# | Views: 3