[Haskell] combining IntMaps

[Scherrer, Chad]

Ok, it looks like I have some more reading to do. Do you know where I
can find a description of the Hedge algorithm?

Also, I'm pretty new here - these conversations eventually need to get
moved to haskell-cafe, right? Is there any concrete guidance regarding
when that should happen? The distinction between the two lists is still
vague to me.

-Chad

-----Original Message-----
From: Adrian Hey [mailto:ahey at iee.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2005 12:04 AM
To: Scherrer, Chad
Cc: haskell at haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell] combining IntMaps

Hello,

On Tuesday 26 Jul 2005 7:58 pm, Scherrer, Chad wrote:
> Thanks! It's interesting the way your AVL tree library is set up -- 
> there seems to be a much broader degree of functionality than that 
> provided by Data.Set. But I'm trying to see, is there a significant 
> difference in the fundamental data structure.

Well Data.Set is based on a different balanced tree type (weight
balanced trees), similar to those used in the Adams paper. I'm also
quite sceptical about the Hedge algorithm, so the AVL library doesn't
use it. It uses divide and conquer, but not quite as Adams describes it.

But IMO the biggest problem with Data.Set is the inflexible API.
For example..

>From Data.Set:
 union :: Ord a => Set a -> Set a -> Set a  intersect :: Ord a => Set a
-> Set a -> Set a

>From Data.Tree.AVL:
 genUnion :: (e -> e -> COrdering e) -> AVL e -> AVL e -> AVL e
genIntersection :: (a -> b -> COrdering c) -> AVL a -> AVL b -> AVL c

Of course there's no reason why similar functions could not be provided
by Data.Set, but they're not there at present.

> or is the main point that
> the additional functionality could not have otherwise been provided in

> an efficient way without going into the guts of Data.Set?

Yes. This why producing useable libraries like this is so difficult.
There's plenty of reasonable things you just can't do efficiently with
Data.Set. Same is probably true of Data.Tree.AVL of course, but I'm
trying to make it more complete all the time.

Anyway, please try out AVL and let me know if there's anything more
missing.

Regards
--
Adrian Hey