"however the industry has been deprecating implementing an entire algorithm in one go in favour of implementing algorithms incrementally"
I dunno - for something as simple as a binary search there is nothing to increment. Maybe I misunderstand and you meant "incremental" as in where you write a whole algorithm, make sure it works, and then improve it (optimise/remove bugs/add features - not finish it)?
"It feels very retrograde to try to write the whole thing out and only then start thinking about off-by-one errors, computer arithmetic issues, and other edge cases."
Yeah... that is backwards. You should think of these things in advance, and if you have experience, you might have had to deal with them already. Binary search is especially simple - if you get the algorithm wrong I'm inclined to believe you are inexperienced, but if you just make typos and such, well... I'd expect that from anyone.
Then again all the rapid application development options today mean that anyone can use a binary search without writing one... or even write complete software with no real understanding of how it works.
> for something as simple as a binary search there is nothing to increment. Maybe I misunderstand and you meant "incremental" as in where you write a whole algorithm, make sure it works, and then improve it (optimise/remove bugs/add features - not finish it)?
I strongly suspect--and I am not being sarcastic or falsely modest--that I am not up to scratch as far as programming is concerned. I almost always get stuff like this wrong when I implement it. My code breaks for empty lists, or with just one element, or lists with an odd number of elements, or something else I can't imagine.
Exposure to recursive algorithms has taught me to build this kind of thing up from simple cases like an empty list or a list with one element. So yes, I really would write a version that works for the empty list, a version that works for either the empty list or just one element, and go from there.
I dunno - for something as simple as a binary search there is nothing to increment. Maybe I misunderstand and you meant "incremental" as in where you write a whole algorithm, make sure it works, and then improve it (optimise/remove bugs/add features - not finish it)?
"It feels very retrograde to try to write the whole thing out and only then start thinking about off-by-one errors, computer arithmetic issues, and other edge cases."
Yeah... that is backwards. You should think of these things in advance, and if you have experience, you might have had to deal with them already. Binary search is especially simple - if you get the algorithm wrong I'm inclined to believe you are inexperienced, but if you just make typos and such, well... I'd expect that from anyone.
Then again all the rapid application development options today mean that anyone can use a binary search without writing one... or even write complete software with no real understanding of how it works.
Maybe I'm just out of date?