Re: [Boost-users] [Review] ITL review starts today, February 18th

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] [Review] ITL review starts today, February 18th
From: Mathias Gaunard (mathias.gaunard_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-02-23 12:29:03

Hartmut Kaiser wrote:

> Interval containers allow to access and manipulate collections of intervals
> on an abstract level as sets and maps (of elements), but also to exploit
> segmental information that is given by the interval borders. Interval
> containers are fairly generic. They can be instantiated with discrete domain
> (or key) types like integral numeric types or boost::date or time types. But
> they also work with continuous domain types like double, rational or string.
> Using the latter allows to represent infinite sets and maps.
> 
> The interface of the interval containers strives to be very intuitive and in
> line with the stl and other boost libraries.
> 
> * The set theoretic operations union, difference, intersection
>   and symmetric difference are available as operators for all
>   interval containers and for many useful overloads between them.

I have no knowledge of the problem domain (nor did I actually look at 
the library yet, sorry about that), but I simply have a question: how 
does this compare to geometry libraries or spatial indexes that provide 
that kind of facilities for arbitrary dimensions?

I certainly wouldn't want to force over-generalization to the authors, 
but I am wondering how much is gained by limiting things to one dimension.