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Discussion on: Improve Your Algorithms with this Simple Equation

 
artoodeeto profile image
aRtoo

maybe joel is talking about javascript. Hes right its a property of an array. Thats how V8 implements it (sorry I cant find the link but Its in v8.dev). In other programming languages its still O(1) or constant time because it will do an arithmetic operation, example before c++14 (not sure) we do it in class was like totalNumberOfbytesInArray / numberOfBytesInInt. or maybe im wrong because it was 2008. lools

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joelnet profile image
JavaScript Joel

When an item is added to or removed from the array, the length property is updated. You can check this by running this code:

const array = [1, 2, 3];
array.length = 100;

console.log(array.length) //=> 100

length NEEDS to be a property, otherwise code like this would become exponential:

for (let i = 0; i < input.length; i++) { }
 
joelnet profile image
JavaScript Joel

I think this Tweet is relevant to the discussion: