LABORATORY EXERCISES FOR PRACTICAL PERFORMANCE OF ALGORITHMS AND DATA-STRUCTURES

This paper addresses the question of theoretical versus practical perf ormance of algorithms and data structures. It describes an experiment the first author has been using in his data structures course to achie ve the primary objective of comparing theoretical behavior of algorith ms with their actual performance, It also presents enhancements in per formance evaluation experiments and a general methodology that can be used to develop experiments in senior or first-year graduate courses i n data structures, algorithm analysis, software engineering, and opera ting systems.