Heap routines...

This is a collection of routines for managing a heap data structure.

There are two major components: a heap component, and an element
component.

A heap package basically keeps a collection of elements and is
able to return the smallest one.

The heap component interface is defined in Heap(3) and must be
supported by all heap packages.  Currently there are three heap
components provided:

    Heap::Fibonacci  (the preferred one)
    Heap::Binomial
    Heap::Binary

See the book "Algorithms" by Cormen, Leiserson, and Rivest for
details of the three heap packages.

The element package wraps the data that is to be stored and retrieved
on the heap.  You can inherit from the Heap::Elem object to embed
element capability into your own objects, or you can use the provided
objects to embed your data into elements without having to
specifically design your dat for that purpose.  The Heap::Elem(3)
module provides a detailed description of the requirements of an
element module.  (The main ones are that it must provide a cmp method
so that the elements can be ordered, and it must provide a heap
method that will either store or retrieve a scalar value so that the
heap routines can map an element reference into its position within
the heap.

Version 0.70 was used for the graph routines in the book "Mastering
Algorithms with Perl", and there has been some feedback from users,
which indicates that it is not too rough around the edges.

Comments to:

    John Macdonald <john@perlwolf.com>

Copyright:

    This code is copyright 1998-2007 O'Reilly & Associates.  It is
    available on the same terms as perl itself.