On Jan 18, 7:01 pm, Paddy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Jan 18, 9:47 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:> Tim, > > > Thanks for the topsort code. It would be useful in a project I'm > > working on. Can I use the code for free under public domain? Thanks! > > When I needed one I didn't know the name. I'm curious, how did you > know to look for the topological sort algorithm by name?
I spent quite a bit of time looking for this one myself. It was quite a stumper. Sometimes Google gets us in the habit of just firing random search terms when we ought to be thinking it out. After quite of bit of dead end searching--like a week--I stepped back, thought about what I was looking for. I wanted a sort of dependency system: A must happen before B. What other programs do that? make, of course. I looked at the documents for make and found the term "directed acyclic graph", and pretty much instantly knew I had it. (It seems silly in retrospect that I didn't think of graphs before that, but then it also seems silly no one invented movable type before 1436.) Once I had that term, a quick Google search led me to the Wikipedia article, which led me to the topsort algorithm. I did a dance of joy. Ten minutes later I saw it mentioned it on comp.lang.python. Carl Banks -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
