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Re: Would you consider this a bug? [message #13053 is a reply to message #12982]

Fri, 02 October 1998 00:00

Martin Schultz
Messages: 515
Registered: August 1997

Senior Member

David Kastrup wrote:
>
> Kevin Ivory <Kevin.Ivory@linmpi.mpg.de> writes:
>
>> Leaving the bug topic - switching to algorithms
>>
>> David Kastrup wrote:
>>> Unfortunately, translating something like
>>>
>>> a[[5,2,3,0,4,1]] = a
>>> into the equivalent
>>> a = a[[3,5,1,2,4,0]]
>>> is not easy to do in the general case.
>>
>> Actually it is: you need a second call to sort. See example below.
>>
>>> some data that needed to be processed in sorted order, the results
>>> needed to be rearranged in original order.
>>>
>>> Something like
>>> s = sort(a)
>>> a = a[s]
>>> process(a)
>> ; a[s] = a ; I still think this a dangerous thing to do.
>> r = sort(s)
>> a = a[r]
>
> [netiquette comment cut]
>
> Second, I refuse to call a significantly time-consuming routine like
> "sort" (O(n log n)) twice without good reason. Especially when a
> simple workaround like writing
> a[s] = a+0
> will do the trick.
>

Although I really agree with Kevin in terms of the danger that lies in
using some pecularity of IDL (which makes it hard to understand a
program, too), I must admit that there is a significant difference in
execution speed if you can avoid the second sort command. For a 20000
floating point array ( a=sin(findgen(20000)/360.*!PI) ), I find
execution times of 0.01xx vs 0.06xx secs if once compares (in Eric's
'terminology') a[s]=a[*] with a=a[sort(s)]. Well, this is definitively
not worth risking anything. BUT if you go to 2M elements, the difference
becomes one between 2 secs and 22 secs, which does matter. In any case,
as always: a nice comment in the program would help ;-)

Regards,
Martin.

------------------------------------------------------------ -------
Dr. Martin Schultz
Department for Engineering&Applied Sciences, Harvard University
109 Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford St., Cambridge, MA-02138, USA

phone: (617)-496-8318
fax : (617)-495-4551

e-mail: mgs@io.harvard.edu
Internet-homepage: http://www-as.harvard.edu/people/staff/mgs/
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[Message index]

		Would you consider this a bug? By: David Kastrup on Wed, 30 September 1998 00:00
		Re: Would you consider this a bug? By: David Kastrup on Mon, 05 October 1998 00:00
		Re: Would you consider this a bug? By: muswick on Sat, 03 October 1998 00:00
		Re: Would you consider this a bug? By: Martin Schultz on Fri, 02 October 1998 00:00
		Re: Would you consider this a bug? By: David Kastrup on Thu, 01 October 1998 00:00
		Re: Would you consider this a bug? By: korpela on Thu, 01 October 1998 00:00
		Re: Would you consider this a bug? By: Kevin Ivory on Thu, 01 October 1998 00:00
		Re: Would you consider this a bug? By: David Kastrup on Thu, 01 October 1998 00:00
		Re: Would you consider this a bug? By: Kevin Ivory on Thu, 01 October 1998 00:00

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