Chapter Six: Searching
Let’s look at the record.
— AL SMITH (1928)
This chapter might have been given the more pretentious title “Storage and Retrieval of Information”; on the other hand, it might simply have been called “Table Look-Up.” We are concerned with the process of collecting information in a computer’s memory, in such a way that the information can subsequently be recovered as quickly as possible. Sometimes we are confronted with more data than we can really use, and it may be wisest to forget and to destroy most of it; but at other times it is important to retain and organize the given facts in such a way that fast retrieval is possible.
Most of this chapter is devoted to the study of a very simple search problem: how to find the ...
Get Art of Computer Programming, The: Volume 3: Sorting and Searching, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
