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. This is version 0.70 - it 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 Copyright: This code is copyright 1998-2003 O'Reilly & Associates. It is available on the same terms as perl itself.