Re: Heap sorting in perl

[Ovid]

Can you give some examples where it's having problems? Perhaps we can figure out what's going on. To be fair, I haven't used Heap.pm, but I did notice that it's tests are not terribly comprehensive, so I'm not surprised. I confess a desire to see what's not working and start writing tests for it :)

If you happen to have a copy of "Mastering Algorithms with Perl", by O'Reilly, they have a heap implementation in there along with an excellent discussion. Perhaps rolling your own my help?

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.
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[blakem]

Thanks for the book tip... After skimming through the "Mastering Algorithms" section on heaps and reading through the Heap.pm source, I was able to build a small script that seems to work:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use Heap::Binary;
use Heap::Elem::Num;

my $heap = Heap::Binary->new;

for (25,33,107,5,42,29) {
  my $elem = Heap::Elem::Num->new($_);
  $heap->add( $elem );
}

my $min = $heap->extract_minimum();

print "Min: " . $min->val . "\n";   # prints 5

Unfortunately this doesn't exactly match the usage explained in the POD. It could be just a documentation bug, but it worries me a bit.

-Blake

[Anonymous Monk]

I just attempted to download and install Heap. Its example broke for me upon attempting call add. (Not autoloaded.) Perl 5.6.1 on Linux here.

Is anyone maintaining it? Is it worthwhile to file a bug report?

[blakem]

I got the same error with Perl 5.8 on Linux. After a quick search turned up mixed reviews for the module, I decided to post here before making my next move. At the very least, I'll email the author of Heap with a bug report.

-Blake