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Comment by cobbal | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, "Correct" means "satisfies a specification". The specification is often about the final result, but it's not limited to it.

As an example, I would call a function called "mergeSort" that takes O(n^2) time incorrect.

You can have it fast, or correct, or both, or neither.

Here's an extremely fast sorting algorithm that's incorrect:

  function cobbalSort(arr) { return arr; }