Re: std::set as search tree - manipulate elements?

From:
Dennis <djmuhlestein@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++.moderated
Date:
Thu, 17 Jul 2008 12:07:51 CST
Message-ID:
<681b56c7-2499-40de-bd7e-b3b3ca83df08@t54g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>
On Jul 17, 1:54 am, Rune Allnor <all...@tele.ntnu.no> wrote:

Hi all.

I would like to use std::set to implement a histogram.
In essence the histogram contains some elements

struct histbin{
           int bin;
           int count;
   /* constructors */
          bool operator<(const histbin& h) const {return bin < h.bin;};

};

where histbin::bin denotes the range of each bin and
histbin::count denotes the number of hits.

The problem is how to build the histogram. Since
std::set is specified to have O(log n) search time,
it must necessarily be implemented as some sort of
tree structure. I would like to exploit this to do
something like

std::set<histbin> histogram;

std::set<histbin>::iterator i;
while (/* data coming in */)
{
     i=histogram.find(data);
     if (i!=histogram.end())
     {
         (*i).count+=1; // <<<<<======
     }
     else
    {
       /* insert new bin */
    }

}

The problem is the tagged line. Apparently, all elements
in std::set are declared 'const', so I am not allowed to
manipulate the elements directly. Do note that I do *not*
manipulate the histbin::bin element, which is used as the
key for sorting, and thus it ought to be safe to manipulate
the histbin::count elements.

Is there a convemient, safe way to be able to use std::set
as the search tree for this histogram?

If 'no', are there other STL containesr that can be used?
I would prefer not to have to implement a tree from scratch,
but if there are no alternatives I would like to know that
early on, and just get to work...


Could you instead use a map?

std::map<int,histbin> histogram;
std::map<int,histbin>::iterator finditr;
while (/* data coming in */)
  {

       finditr=histogram.find(i);
       if (finditr!=histogram.end())
       {
           finditr->second.icount+=1;
       }
       else
      {
         /* insert new bin */
      }

  }

The find function on the map is also Logarithmic. They keys are
internally stored as sorted already and you don't need to worry about
that part.

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