Igor Ostrovsky on July 21st, 2008

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. While many standard libraries for various programming languages provide a sorted set data structure, there are numerous problems that require more control over the internal data structure than a sorted […]

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Igor Ostrovsky on June 16th, 2008

There is a lot of information on the concurrent primitives and concepts exposed by the .NET Framework 3.5 available on MSDN, blogs, and other websites. The goal of this post is to distill the information into an easy-to-digest high-level summary: what are the different pieces, where they differ and how they relate. If you want […]

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I realized that there is a very clean way to express a multi-clause if statement by composing ternary conditional operators like this: var result = condition1 ? result1 : condition2 ? result2 : condition3 ? result4 … : conditionN ? resultN : default;

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Igor Ostrovsky on May 26th, 2008

In responses to my last week’s post, several readers mentioned LINQ-like operators they implemented themselves. I also had ideas for operators that would lead to neat solutions for some problems, so I decided to give it some thought and collect up the most useful operators into a reusable library. My goal was to include operators […]

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Igor Ostrovsky on May 18th, 2008

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 […]

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Igor Ostrovsky on May 9th, 2008

The folks at Dev 102 posted a programming job interview challenge. It is rather easy, but I figured that it may be a nice change of pace, since my last posting was fairly involved. The challenge is to reverse the bits in each byte, given a large array of bytes. What is the fastest possible […]

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Igor Ostrovsky on May 4th, 2008

What is the time complexity of quicksort? The answer that first pops up in my head is O(N logN). That answer is only partly right: the worst case is in fact O(N2). However, since very few inputs take anywhere that long, a reasonable quicksort implementation will almost never encounter the quadratic case in real life. […]

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