Question

Consider a LIST implemented by array, and containing N elements. The REMOVE operation has worst case time complexity of...

a. O(1)
b. O(log N)
c. O(N)
d. O(N²)

Answer 1

The REMOVE operation in a list implemented by an array has a worst-case time complexity of O(N), as you may need to shift up to N - 1 elements.

Step-by-step explanation:

When discussing the REMOVE operation in a list implemented by an array, the worst-case time complexity is an important aspect to consider. For a list containing N elements, if you need to remove an element from anywhere in the list except the end, you potentially have to shift all the elements that come after it to fill the gap. Therefore, in the worst case, you might have to move N - 1 elements, if you are removing the first element, which gives us a time complexity of O(N). This is because the time it takes scales linearly with the size of the list, N.