At Fri, 11 Jun 2010 23:07:19 +0900, Raymond Wan wrote:
Compatibility with similar structures from std is a good place to start. It would be annoying to replace an std::priority_queue with one of yours and discover that I needed to invert the comparison operator.
True. But one can also say that a heap (max-heap) and a priority queue are two separate things -- the latter is kind of an abstraction? A priority queue is just a queue of items with an assigned priority; no one says that it has to be implemented using a heap. Of course, in practice, most books and instructors use a heap only because it is one of the easiest ways to do it. I suppose a priority queue can be implemented less efficiently using a binary search tree and still be called a priority queue?
That is, maybe a max-heap shouldn't be interchangeable with a priority queue? Or, that a heap should have been part of std first...but I presume this project's aim is to correct this omission? :-)
Don't forget, the standard also has heap algorithms that use the same default sort criterion. -- Dave Abrahams BoostPro Computing http://www.boostpro.com