skip lists

[Richard Gaskin]

Geoff Canyon wrote:
 > In non-high-level languages:
 > Linked lists...
 > ...They're slow to find elements in, which skip lists help to address.

Exactly.

 > In LC:
 > Arrays allocate memory below the level we look at, as do all other
 > storage forms. Any implementation of a linked list that I can think
 > of would probably be slower than simply writing to an array.

I probably should have mentioned that this needs to be a persistent 
store, hence my patience with trying all manner of seemingly weird things.

If this were just an in-memory structure an array would be great, but of 
course any means of converting arrays to and from disk are 
computationally expensive.

Worse, my aim here is to run all this in the most stringent of 
environments:  a CGI, where the app must initialize, run, return a 
result, and die, all in as small a fraction of a second as possible.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for Desktop, Mobile, and Web
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