Re: Ada 95 for an ARM-based bare board?

[dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar)]

tmoran@acm.org wrote in message news:<pG_99.325$kO6.29849783@newssvr21.news.prodigy.com>...
> > b) people quoting entire messages all the time. The most aggravating
> > is when you get two people doing it at one another and generating
> > quadratic amounts of
> > quoted junk.

>   This is wrong.  It's exponential.

Oh dear!

Time for an elementary lesson in math :-)
(well actually in computer science, you need to be able to do this
sort of thing to do elementary complexity analysis of algorithms)

Let's suppose that everyone adds 10 lines and quotes everything before

then we have message lengths that are

10 20 30 40 50 60 70

Each message contains one copy (only) of everything that has been sent before
(not multiple copies). I trust that is obvious

In other words the size of message N is 10N lines

So the size of messages grows only linearly

But, by elementary summing of an arithmetic series, the total amount of space
occupied by the first N messages will be

(10 + 10N)/2 * N  = (10N + 10N**2) / 2

The quadratic term dominates and the result is asymptotically

  5 * N**2

which is called quadratic.

The casual use of exponential to talk of things that grow fast is something
that technical people should avoid!