bearophileHUGS at lycos.com wrote:
> John Doty:
> > Yes. The efficient exact algorithms for this problem use *partial*
> > sorts. The Forth one from the FSL is of this class (although I know of
> > two better ones for big arrays). But it's tough to beat the efficiency
> > of the approximate histogram-based method the Python stats module
> > implements.
>> The usual way to compute a true median with Python may be:
>> def median(inlist):
> newlist = sorted(inlist)
> index = len(newlist) // 2
> if len(newlist) % 2:
> return newlist[index]
> else:
> return (newlist[index] + newlist[index-1]) / 2.0
>[snip]
no sort() is needed to calculate the median of a list.
you just need one temp var.
