Genealogy Display Program: A Larger Example of Use of STL
The SIGACT
Theoretical Computer Science Genealogy lists information on earned
doctoral degrees (adviser, university, and year) of theoretical
computer scientists worldwide. The website provides a convenient
means of looking up individuals a few at a time. To get the "big
picture," though, it's useful to display the entire forest of academic
ancestor trees represented in the TCS Genealogy data base. The treeform program does that, working
from an ascii file version (72k)
of the data (obtained from
http://hercule.csci.unt.edu/genealogy/textfile.html and slightly
updated)
and producing a listing (102K)
that displays the tree structure using indentation. The students of
each Ph.D advisor are listed in order of date of the students' Ph.Ds
(oldest first).
The output contains many fascinating details, but it is also
instructive to examine the program to see how it combines several
components of STL
(vectors, maps, multisets, the generic find algorithm, and library- and
user-defined function objects) to do the job efficiently and
succinctly.
This program has been compiled and executed successfully with the GNU
C++ compiler (version 2.7.2), the Apogee apCC compiler (SUN Unix,
version 3.0), and the IBM Visual Age C++ compiler (Windows 95, version
3.5). Note that one header file needed, bstring.h, is not
part of STL but is available here.
(If you already have the STL version from the Rensselaer ftp site, bstring.h
is included.)