> I think the intent is to calculate medians on longer running streams of data than that. Why would you even use this algorithm for 5 values?
I don't know if you realize but these kinds of comments are incredibly frustrating to respond to. It's like you didn't even try to understand the comment before replying. I was not saying "it's terrible because it easily fails on 5 elements". I was saying "it's terrible because it easily fails, and to illustrate, here's an example with 5 elements that will help you understand the problem I'm talking about". Does that make sense? Surely it's not rocket science to see that the number 5 wasn't special here? Surely you can see how, say, if your list starts at 2E9 and goes up to 3E9, the exact same problem would occur for the billion-element list, and hence that my gripe was probably not about 5-element lists?
I don't know if you realize but these kinds of comments are incredibly frustrating to respond to. It's like you didn't even try to understand the comment before replying. I was not saying "it's terrible because it easily fails on 5 elements". I was saying "it's terrible because it easily fails, and to illustrate, here's an example with 5 elements that will help you understand the problem I'm talking about". Does that make sense? Surely it's not rocket science to see that the number 5 wasn't special here? Surely you can see how, say, if your list starts at 2E9 and goes up to 3E9, the exact same problem would occur for the billion-element list, and hence that my gripe was probably not about 5-element lists?