duncanwest

Yes, but that's not what he says. He says "The loop will repeat on average n! times". That's not true. He's not referring to O notation there, he brings that in later. Here he's talking about the imperative number of times a loop will run on average.

Edit: you've edited your paragraph to make my reply look silly. The whole paragraph is not in O notation. In fact - the exact opposite. In the last sentence of that paragraph he shows what the expression with constant factors looks like before converting it into O notation, and it's wrong! "The product (n-1)n! is O(n × n!)." Bzzzzzzt! Wrong! He should say "The product (n-1)(n!/2) is O(n × n!)."

You say it will take on average n! attempts to find a sorted list randomly. This is false. It will take on average n!/2 attempts.

Why be cruel to designers with your silly joke?