Educator

Program Analysis, Part II

• The analysis of a program means how complex and efficient a program is.

• Efficiency of a program means how much resources and time does a program take to perform a task. In many cases most program are either efficient in their use of resources or are efficient in the amount of time they take to perform the task.

• Complexity of an algorithm means how difficult is the solution to understand and implement.

• Big O notation is used to represent the efficiency of a program, it is not precise, but is a very close estimate. Some of the common Big O are:

• O(log n) means to process a list containing n elements took one iteration (loop), but the list was shortened each time by half.

• O(n) means to process a list containing n elements took one iteration (loop)

• O(n log n) means to process a list containing n elements it takes a pair of nested loop but the list is reduced by half each time in the inner iteration (loop)

• O(n² ) means to process a list containing n elements, it takes a pair of nested loops.