in reply to Special binary search

The binary search approaches in 11134164 and 11134184 are probably best. However, if the range indices are usually near the ends of the arrays then it would also be worth looking at a simple linear search. This is particularly so if they are, on average, in the first and last ten items as then you have 10+10=20 iterations without much overhead.

Something like this (untested) code might work:

# set up data my $tgt_left = 1; my $tgt_right = 10; my @data = (0,0,0,0,0,1..10,100..150); my $left = 0; $left++ while $data[$left] < $tgt_left; my $right = $#data; $right-- while $data[$right] > $tgt_right; foreach my $i ($left..$right) { # do stuff with @data }

Benchmarking would be needed to confirm or otherwise.

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Re^2: Special binary search
by olepi (Initiate) on Jun 23, 2021 at 16:01 UTC
    Wow, thanks for all the swift help!

    I've gone with the first binary search, but changed it to look for a value inside the window. Once found, then I can just go up and down the list and populate the array until it hits one of the window limits. Then fill out the rest of the array with MIN or MAX values. So only one binary search needed.

    I had never seen Memoize before, using that.

    The class idea is great, but probably overkill in this case.