Today in my computer science class the professor said: Time Complexity of addition is relative to the number of bits of the two numbers being added.
Does this mean an algorithm which goes through a list of numbers 1 to n(some input number), and computes the sum of the numbers in the list using a sum variable is actually O(n^2)? Because the time to add the numbers is relative to the number of bits n has?
I am confused because I feel like most people would say this is O(n). I don't know much about low level stuff yet so I am sorry if this is a dumb question.