Just recently I came across this request to shift an entire slice of an array while keeping the algorithm cost to its bare minimum. Let’s put it this way. It’s pretty simple if you have something like ABCDE and you want to shift the elements so it becomes CDEAB. Now, the big problem is this – what if you have 1 billion bytes in this array and you need to perform sort of the same operation? That’s trick, right? Most likely, I wouldn’t be able to afford an additional high amount of memory to perform this.

So here’s what I came up with. The code is written in Python.

def f_ArrayExercise(a, i):
    n = 0
    while i <= len(a) - 1:
        a[i], a[n] = a[n], a[i]
        i += 1
        n += 1
        if len(a)%2 and len(a) > 1:
            a[len(a)-1], a[len(a)-2] = a[len(a)-2], a[len(a)-1]
    print a

The secret here is to swap one element at a time in order to save in memory space. However, note that with minor modifications we can easily swap pre-determined chuncks of the array at a time instead of limiting ourselves to one element – just in case we know we can afford a couple more elements. That would help optimize the processing time.

The first argument of the function is the array itself, the second argument is the exact spot you want to use to start shifting the array.

When you play around with this function, you get something like this: