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I would check your “slightly”. If I have an algorithm that operates on an n-element data structure through a helper function (this includes almost any nontrivial program - think managing caches, small databases or tables, lists of clients, etc), you get an extra multiplicative factor of n for each operation. All those nice linear-time or n-log-n algorithms turn into n^2, and accidentally quadratic programs can be bad news.

And if the language offers no facility at all to get the factor of n back, users may be forced to use something else.



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