ropes

I've looked at different papers and here is the information that I've gathered: SGI implementation and C cords neither guarantee O(1) time concatenation for long ropes nor ~log N depth for shorter ones. Different sources contradict each other. Wikipedia claims O(1) concatenation. This page says that concatenation is O(1) only when one operand is small and O(log N) otherwise. So, what is the time complexity of concatenation? When exactly rebalancing is performed to ensure this concatenation complexity while maintaining tree balance? Are some specific usage patterns assumed when talking about

Is there a public implementation of the Rope data structure in C#? For what its worth, here is an immutable Java implementation . You could probably convert it to C# in less than an hour. I'm not aware of a Rope implementation (though there probably is one!), but if you're only after doing concatenation, StringBuilder will do the job. The BigList<T> class from Wintellect Power Collections (a C# data structure library) is somehow similar to rope: http://docs.pushtechnology.com/docs/4.5.7/dotnet/externalclient/html/class_wintellect_1_1_power_collections_1_1_big_list_3_01_t_01_4.html I measured

Related to this question , based on a comment of user Eric Lippert . Is there any scenario where the Rope data structure is more efficient than a string builder? It is some people's opinion that rope data structures are almost never better in terms of speed than the native string or string builder operations in typical cases, so I am curious to see realistic scenarios where indeed ropes are better. The documentation for the SGI C++ implementation goes into some detail on the big O behaviours verses the constant factors which is instructive. Their documentation assumes very long strings being

I was wondering under what circumstances you would use a rope over another STL container? Ropes are a scalable string implementation: they are designed for efficient operation that involve the string as a whole. Operations such as assignment, concatenation, and substring take time that is nearly independent of the length of the string. Unlike C strings, ropes are a reasonable representation for very long strings such as edit buffers or mail messages. Advantages : Much faster concatenation and substring operations involving long strings. Inserting a character in the middle of a 10 megabyte rope