Talk:Instruction path length

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With many computer architectures, two different machine instructions may require different time for execution. E.g. an ADD machine instruction (addition) may take only 1 cycle, while an SQRT machine instruction (square root) may take several hundred cycles.

My question therefore is how at all instruction path length can be deemed a measure of the algorithms performance on a particular computer hardware? At least drawbacks of using IPL as a measure should be mentioned in this article. --Abdull (talk) 12:18, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

"order of items in unsorted lookup list - most frequently occurring items should be placed first to avoid long searches" Isn't this a form of sorting? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.68.32.159 (talk) 16:06, 19 January 2010 (UTC)