Sorting without transitivity

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth Michael Hudson:
  [...]
> Do you (or anyone else) know why it's called a *topological* sort?

Not really.  Knuth says: "The problem of topological sorting is to
embed the partial order in a linear order."  [TAoCP, 2.2.3.]

> Don't see no topology here, off hand.
>
> It could be that the open subsets of a topological space are a poset
> under inclusion, I guess.

Hm... poset == partially ordered set?

Certainly inclusion is a partial order of subsets, and a
topological sort finds an inclusion-preserving map from any space
S to a space T in which inclusion satisfies the trichotomy
condition.  Is that what topologists mean by "embed S in T"?

-- 
Steven Taschuk              Aral: "Confusion to the enemy, boy."
staschuk at telusplanet.net    Mark: "Turn-about is fair play, sir."
                             -- _Mirror Dance_, Lois McMaster Bujold