Boost Interval Container Library

jey · on March 25, 2011

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

asymptotic · on March 25, 2011

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...) 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 · on March 25, 2011

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.