On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 10:47:33 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu
<[email protected]> wrote:
I finalized BinaryHeap. It's pretty cool - it builds a forward range on
top of a random-access range - typically T[] - or a random-access
container - typically Array!T.
The difference is simple - if you build on top of a range the heap can't
grow beyond the size of that range. Building on top of a container makes
the heap growable.
Making BinaryHeap a range is actually pretty cool - just walking the
heap is tantamount to lazily sorting the container. (Of course
BinaryHeap has primitives in addition to the four range primitives.)
Do you agree with putting BinaryHeap in std.range (as opposed to
std.container)?
If BinaryHeap can be added to, how is it a range? I would suspect that
BinaryHeap can be in std.range, but a BinaryHeap that takes a container as
an input is definitely not a range IMO. You might say the same about an
array, but an array is special in that if I append to one array, it does
not affect the other.
I don't know where it belongs. To me, a range is a type that in itself
cannot affect the topology of the data structure. It's like a window into
the data structure that provides a common interface. A container is the
owner of the data structure, and can provide ranges over its data. This
may be an inadequate view, but its worked for me so far.
-Steve
