RE: Building a Table with initially unknown length?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg24234] RE: [mg24248] Building a Table with initially unknown length?
- From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
- Date: Tue, 4 Jul 2000 15:22:00 -0400 (EDT)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
> -----Original Message----- > From: AES [mailto:siegman at stanford.edu] To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net > > Is there a clean and transparent way to build a Table which grows in > length either to some initially specified maximum length, or until a > test is met? > > One way to do this is obviously to use a While[ ] loop, adding an > element to the table each time around the loop -- but I've been led to > believe that Append'ing an elements to a list is a slower process. > The Mathematica Book discusses one relatively efficient way to built lists at the end of Section 2.4.4. It is more efficient to build up a nested list structure and then Flatten it. The following code generates random numbers that have a small chance of being negative. It builds up a list to a maximum length of 10000 or until it generates the first negative number. Timing[result = Module[{list={}, x, i = 0, max = 10000}, While[x = Random[Integer, {-2, 10000}]; i++; !(i > max || x < 0), list = {x, list}]; Flatten[list]]; Length[result]] {0.22 Second, 7425} David Park djmp at earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/