title: What is a*<a[j] in pseudocode?
body: <p>I was trying the time complexity mcq questions given in codechef under practice for Data Structures and Algorithms. One of the questions had a line a*&lt; a[i]. What does that line mean?</p>
  
  <p>I know that if there wasn't an and statement the complexity would have been O(n^2). But the a*&lt; is completely alien to me. I searched for it in the internet but all I got was about the a star algorithm and asterisks! I tried running the program in python with a print statement but it says that * is invalid. Does that mean something like a pointer to the 1st element in the array or something?</p>
  
  <p>Find the time complexity of the following function</p>
  
  <pre><code>    n = len(a)
      j = 0
      for i =0 to n-1:
          while (j &lt; n and a* &lt; a[j]):
              j += 1
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The answer is given as O(n). But there are nested loops so it is supposed to be O(n^2).Help required! Thanks</p>