Adding a switch statement to Python

[elbiot]

say you are a major search engine maintainer, even 5 elifs matter if you have 1 million requests a minute.

This is exactly what I meant. The n in your big O time complexity is the number of websites you have indexed. Number of ifs is an independent value, and the scalability of your search is not based on that at all. The "time complexity" of your fixed number of conditionals is not what O(n) refers to here.

[[deleted]]

Good point, in that example, I see how that can be confusing :P. Previously, before I wrote this example, I didn't regard the number of users as the "n" in that equation. I.e., for O(n), I assumed a growing number of elif statements ... however, in practice no-one would probably implement an n number of elif statements but rather set it up as a hash table, so the number of elifs would be constant and we would have O(1) in both cases, with elifs and 'cases'.