Steven Watanabe wrote:
Maybe I missed something but why pure virtual functions?
Heap is simply a concept, and should be treated as an abstract base class, I believe, and should never be instantiated. Individual models should take up all the slack of actually implementing these methods. Do I have the wrong understanding?
virtual void remove( iterator& elem ) = 0; virtual void update( iterator& elem ) = 0;
Why is the iterator passed by non-const reference?
It shouldn't be. I got tied up a bit in the different levels of dereferencing in my head and was thinking const references wouldn't allow me to do what was needed. I blame it on the algorithms exam I just took frying my brain a little too much for one night.
virtual iterator& findMin() = 0; virtual void removeMin() = 0;
top and pop would be more consistent with std::priority_queue.
findMin and removeMin (or even moreso deleteMin) are more consistent with standard heap terminology. It's a well-known group of data structures taught in curricula all over and studied since who knows when. Why conform to the terminology of a specific implementation in a programming language that's not nearly as old or well-established? I'm providing the PriorityQueue class as essentially a wrapper with the potentially more appealing push/pop terminology for this reason. Sorry if that sounded overly aggressive, it wasn't my intent.
<snip> virtual iterator& begin() = 0; virtual iterator& end() = 0;
How can these possible return a /reference/ to an iterator?
This was a careless mistake on my part. Thank you for calling me on it. :D Dan Larkin