heap doesn't appear to work as described

skip at pobox.com skip at pobox.com
Wed Apr 4 09:05:01 EDT 2007


    >>>> My book says that in a heap, a value at position i will be than the
    >>>> values at positions 2*i and 2*i + 1.

    >> I am sure your book either uses 1-based arrays or a 0-based arrays
    >> with the first not used.  The need to keep these alternatives in mind
    >> is an unfortunate fact of programming life.

    > My book uses lists.

Yes, but is the first element of the list addressed as element 1 or element
0?  Terry was doing the transformation from 1-based to 0-based indexing to
demonstrate that the invariants you described were the same as those
maintained by Python's heapq module.

Skip




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