Re: Computational complexity of accessing the Nth item

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005 22:41:34 -0000, Michael Kay <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > probably not a direct reference, but by calling a function myLast()
> > that returns
> >        $sequence[last]
> >
> > I want this to be calculated only once. My question was will it be
> > successful to use the
> >
> > saxon:memo-function="yes" attribute
> >
> > on the definition of myLast()
> 
> I suspect that's not a good idea. Evaluating $seq[last] is probably much
> faster than calculating the hash key to discover that the result is already
> stored. Memo functions work best when the arguments are small.
> 
> As always, though, the only definitive answer is to measure it.

Thank you, Mike.