

Boost Interval Container Library - cosbynator
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_46_1/libs/icl/doc/html/index.html

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jey
Boost has lots of things. Why is this one particularly interesting?

~~~
asymptotic
The Boost Interval Container Library (ICL) is relatively new; it's new from
1.46.0, which came out on 21st February 2011, hence it's quite likely few
people have heard of this before.

Also, the underlying implementation
([http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_46_1/libs/icl/doc/html/boost...](http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_46_1/libs/icl/doc/html/boost_icl/implementation.html))
relies on STL sets and maps, rather than using something more exotic like
R-Trees or kd-trees, so this might spark some discussion about alternate
implementations and their respective complexities.

I say might because intervals...well, don't really do it for me. Anyone have
interesting applications?

~~~
sqrt17
If you annotate text, you frequently want to attach information to (word or
character position) intervals.

And you do complex queries over these interval annotations, e.g. (for a simple
example) "which sentences contain both a date and a room number".

Because of the scale of corpora, people often do the storage and queries over
SQL databases rather than in-memory, but the principle is the same.

