An experiment in time complexity versus real world performance
Sample Output:
Runtime of join_words_cat was 5.8871 seconds
Runtime of join_words_builder was 29.0302 seconds
Runtime of join_words_join was 0.5058 seconds
Concatenation-based string building is known to be inefficient in some cases. In the real world, concatenation seems to work just fine for small scale string building. In this example, the additional overhead of a custom string building class far outweighs the benefits of its reduced time complexity. Python's str.join() method is shown to be the simplest and most efficient option, boosted by its efficient algorithm and C implementation.