Victor A. Wagner Jr. wrote:
are the lists sorted?
Cory Nelson wrote:
Yep. If you're going where I think you're going (binary search), I was about halfway through the modifications when I opened the email. Lack of sleep will get to you... :(
Dave Abrahams wrote:
That'll only work if the ranges are non-overlapping. Otherwise you'll need to use an interval tree to avoid an O(N) search for each interval you want to remove.
Victor A. Wagner Jr. Replied:
you're likely correct, but we were looking at handling some stuff with imprecise (error probabilities) results and we were on the track of doing some stuff along these lines. The project was cancelled (shame, I think it would fit well with the physical quantities systems... you just can't measure things as closely as you'd like) so we never got to see how/if all of the algorithms would work or whether we'd have to specialize them for "fuzzy" numbers.
Have you seen the Boost Interval library?
I think it's worth pursuing for ranges tho.
Why should the OP pursue anything that's likely (your words) to be O(N^2) when there's a known and proven O(N log N) approach? -- Dave Abrahams Boost Consulting http://www.boost-consulting.com