When a programmer sees a chunk of code he tends to evaluate it in a rather intuitive manner and to qualify it as “elegant” or not. This is quite easy, because it’s subjective and nobody knows what exactly elegant means. However behind this there is a powerful mathematical approach of measuring a program effectiveness.

It’s a pity that most of the developers still think of the big O notation as something from the university classes, but unusual in the practice and they barely use it their job. But before describing the big O notation, let me start from something really simple.

Let’s have the following example (note that all the examples are in PHP):

$n = 100;
$s = 0;

for ($i = 0; $i < $n; $i++) {
	for ($j = 0; $j < $n; $j++) {
		$s++;	
	}	
}

As you can see there are two assignments and two nested loops. This is really a widely used example from any algorithm book.

Constants, Languages, Compilers

First of all the time to assign a value to a variable, to compare two values and to increment a variable is constant. It depends on the computer resources, the compiler or the language, but it's constant on one machine if you compare two chunks of code. Now we can see that these operations take (add) constant time to the program, and we can assume this time is respectively a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i.

$n = 100; 	// a
$s = 0;		// b
$i = 0; 	// c
$i < $n; 	// d
$i++;		// e
$j = 0; 	// f
$j < $n;	// g
$j++;		// h
$s++;		// i

What Matters?

Actually the most important thing here is the value of n. By assigning greater values to n the more time will take the program to run. As we can see from the following table by multiplying the value of n by 10, the time became 100 times more.

n		time
10		0.00002
100		0.002
...		...

What happens in fact is that we can sum all these values.

a + b + c + n*d + n*e + n*(f + n*g + n*h + n*i)

and by substituting:

a + b + c = k
d + e + n = l
g + h + i = m

the result is:

m*n² + l*n + k

Conclusion

Here the most important thing is the degree of n, because it can change dramatically the program time consumption depending on the n value. Thus this chunk has a quadratic complexity or O(n²).

Of course there are constants, but in the practice they are not so important. Take a look at these two functions:

f = 2*n²
g = 200*n

OK, for n = 1 the first one will be faster, but as n increments the second function becomes to be faster and faster, thus after a given value of n the second function is really the fastest!

After reading one of the latest posts from Stoyan Stefanov’s blog – phpied.com I stumbled upon an interesting construction in JavaScript describing how to check an object property existence. I’m going to cover this case using as an example the console object, which comes with the Firebug enabled, and I think it may be very useful, just because this object is widely used, but doesn’t exists over all the browsers, even under Firefox when Firebug is disabled. This construction is known as the IN statement and it looks something like that:

property in object

which I’m going to cover later in details.

How you detect a variable existence?

There are three main ways to detect the existence of a property I see in my practice.

1. The most widely used:

if ( console ) { ... }

2. The second and more professional one:

if ( typeof console != 'undefined' ) { ... }

3. And finally the third and most unknown:

if ( console in window ) { ... }

Of course two of them are wrong! Which one should be changed?

Is everything working correctly? No!

Lets see how they are working. First of all I’m going to test all of them on Firefox 3.6 either with enabled and disabled Firebug, just shouting with old school’s alert().

Now the first one using the IN statement:

if ( console in window )
   alert('object exists!');
else
   alert('object doesn\'t exists!');

With Firebug disabled the answer is … nothing! No alert! That’s because the syntax is wrong. There’s an error within the IF statement. We should modify a bit the first row like that:

if ( 'console' in window )
   alert('object exists!');
else
   alert('object doesn\'t exists!');

Now everything’s OK. With a disabled Firebug the answer is: “object doesn’t exists!”, and after enabling it, normally the “object exists!”.

Lets move on the next example:

if ( console )
   alert('object exists!');
else
   alert('object doesn\'t exists!');

With Firebug enabled the answer is as we expect: “object exists!”, but after disabling it yet again – nothing?! Why’s that? Because the console object doesn’t exists anymore and the IF statement doesn’t return true or false, but simply crashes. How to modify the code? Simply by adding a window.console instead of console.

if ( window.console )
   alert('object exists!');
else
   alert('object doesn\'t exists!');

Than the answer is: “the object doesn’t exists!” after what we expected!

The third method is the mostly used, just because it’s completely clear what’s the goal of the IF statement:

if ( typeof console != 'undefined' )
   alert('object exists!');
else
   alert('object doesn\'t exists!');

In both disabled and enabled Firebug the answer is as expected!

Now the IN statement may be used if not for the console, but for checking the existence of a property of within an object.