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Advanced Data Structures?
mdf356 asks: "It's been 5 years since I left graduate school and started designing and writing software for a living. After 5 years of writing operating systems code, I feel like I've forgotten some of the more advanced data structures I used to know. The next time an interesting problem arises, I'd like to have more in my toolbox than hashes, linked lists, heaps and various binary and n-way trees. I'd like something short and sweet, more in the line of the standard C book. Algorithm Design by Kleinberg and Tardos looks likely to be too basic, but I haven't read it (I'd like to avoid paying $90 for something that won't meet my needs). CLR is far too large and almost exclusively covers basic territory. Tarjan's Data Structures book looks like it has potential, but seems focused on network algorithms, which are unlikely to be applicable to the kernel programming I do. What are some good reference books on more advanced data structures and algorithms, particularly ones with potential applicability to an operating systems kernel?"
Algorithms in C, Parts 1-5 (Bundle): Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching, and Graph Algorithms (3rd Edition) by Robert Sedgewick
The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald E. Knuth
Two seminal works on the subject. It really depends on your needs however. Nearly anything you would need can be built off of the subjects in those books, but for more specialized datastructures you will probably have to move to specialized books.
Data Structures and Algorithms (ISBN 0201000237) by Aho, Ullman and Hopcroft is a classic that belongs on every programmer's bookshelf (hell, keep it on your desk!).
Wikipedia has a nice collection of data structures. Maybe that's what you're looking for?
r es
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_structu
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
"Lisp uses only nested linked lists, that can be interpreted as binary trees."
As much as people keep saying it, this is totally false... Common Lisp does not even have lists as an intrinsic type. What it does have are cons cells, several kinds of numbers, symbols, characters, strings, several kinds of vectors and arrays, hash tables, structures, instances, and lexical closures among other types native to the language.
Lists are to Lisp what Strings are to C: a convention built upon more basic structures. In the case of C, a string is a convention built up on null terminated arrays of characters. In the case of Lisp, a list is a series of chained together cons cells.
Purely Functional Datastructures by Okasaki.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
> As much as people keep saying it, this is totally false... Common Lisp does not even have lists as an intrinsic type.
Funny how LISP stands for LISt Processing. And this thread is about data structures, not data types. The cons cell might be the central data type in LISP, but the nested list is the central data structure.
Just think about it. '(a b c) will be recognised as a 3 element list by any LISP programmer, and not as 2 cons cells plus 3 atoms (which would be equally correct). Now you can also construct binary trees with cons cells, but that is more complicated and therefore a bit rare.
Thomas
"Just think about it. '(a b c) will be recognised as a 3 element list by any LISP programmer, and not as 2 cons cells plus 3 atoms (which would be equally correct). "
Actually no... it's 3 cons cells. The syntax (a b c) is shorthand for (a . (b . ( c . ()))). This kind of misunderstanding is precisely why any competent (key word) LISP programmer understands the difference between lists and cons cells I was referring to in my original post. The closest structure with only two cons cells is this (a b . c).
Now, As long as we're being pedantic, what you actually wrote, '(a b c), is shorthand for (quote (a b c)). The numbers of cons cells and atoms in that case is a 'exercise for the reader', but suffice it to say that both your numbers are wrong.