Re: Sanity checker?

Ezra Nugroho wrote: > It was a long time since I post any question to this list, like back at > php 3x time. Boy, a lot has change now. > > So I actually did kick some funny bones, not quite flames yet. And > that's good, I don't really like that. > > <Wolf> > We aren't going to take the time > to answer a rhetorical question when you can STFW, RTFM, or RTA. > </Wolf> > > Who are "we"? I hope you are not talking about php community in general. > I would be really sad if that's true. Unfortunately, it seems like > that's the trend in this list. I want newbies to succeed, hence my talk > about such tool. O.W. newbies will go to RoR instead. > > Anyways, > > Have you ever seen things like > > for ($i = 0; $i < count($some_array); $i++) { > //do stuff > } > > > Do you know how slow it is if $some_array gets big compared to > > $array_count = count($some_array); > for ($i = 0; $i < $array_count; $i++) { > //do stuff > } > > > Of course you do! > But newbies might not.... Of course! Every time you ask for the count of an array PHP loops through every item meaning that a doing many counts on a large array (an O(n^2) operation) reduces your program to a crippling crawl. Hang on a tic, that doesn't sound like the PHP that I know. PHP knows the size of the array, doing a count(array) just returns an existing internal number. The count() function doesn't get any slower with the array size and calling a simple function isn't significantly slower than accessing a variable. In fact, the above examples with an array of 100,000 elements didn't result in either script being consistantly faster than the other. David