Comparison With Monolithic Arrays
Advantages:
- Ropes enable much faster insertion and deletion of text than monolithic string arrays, on which operations have time complexity O(n).
- Ropes don't require the extra O(n) memory that arrays need for copying operations, and ropes don't require large contiguous memory spaces.
Disadvantages:
- Slightly greater overall space usage (mainly to store parent nodes)
- Increase in time to manage the extra storage
This table compares the algorithmic characteristics of string and rope implementations, not their "raw speed". Array-based strings have smaller overhead, so (for example) concatenation and split operations are faster on small datasets. However, when array-based strings are used for longer strings, time complexity and memory usage for insertion and deletion of characters become unacceptably large. A rope data structure, on the other hand, has stable performance regardless of data size. Moreover, the space complexity for ropes and arrays are both O(n). In summary, ropes are better suited when the data is large and frequently modified.
| Operation | Rope | String |
|---|---|---|
| Index | O(log n) | O(1) |
| Split | O(log n) | O(1) |
| Concatenate | O(log n) | O(n) |
| Iterate over each character | O(n) | O(n) |
| Insert | O(log n) | O(n) |
| Delete | O(log n) | O(n) |
| Report | O(j + log n) | O(j) |
| Build | O(n) | O(n) |
Read more about this topic: Rope (computer Science)
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