sorting vector array based on first component

This depends on how your matrix and row data structures look really, but one approach is to write a custom comparison operator for your row structure that only looks at the first element, put your row objects in a standard container and send it to a sorting algorithm (also from the standard library). This solution should be quick to implement, but it got some overhead that might make it unsuitable for you. If that's the case, you can rewrite your data structures to work with the C++ Standard Library interfaces or roll your own implementation of a sorting algorithm that's suitable for your data. If you're going with the standard library, this is a nice place to start.

Thanks guys! This is really good stuff.

DG

Quote:

Original post by danielgamedev wow! Anonymous. That is some heavy duty stuff. I'm not too familiar with the Microsoft Runtime Library. could you explain this syntax or point me to a url? " float (*itr)[N] = ... "

std::sort, size_t, ptrdiff_t are part of the C++ standard & standard library.

size_t is used for referring to sizes in both standards C & C++ throughout, its also the type returned from the sizeof operator. size_t is a platform dependant type alias for some unsigned integral type.

ptrdiff_t is the type of the difference of pointers used in both standards C & C++ throughout. ptrdiff_t is a platform dependant type alias for some signed integral type.

Both type aliases are defined in the header stddef.h in C or cstddef in C++.

Moving on: float (*itr)[N] is a a pointer to an array of N elements of type float, where N is known at compile time. There probably isn't much info about them online but i'll give you the gist of it:

In that code in C++:

• The type of matrix is of type float/const float (&)[M][N] (a reference to a 2d array).


• The type of matrix is of type float/const float (&)[N] (a reference to a 1d array).


• The type of matrix[j] is of type float/const float&

Therefore the type of &matrix is float/const float (*)[N] a pointer to a 1d array, therefore when you dereference it its of type float/const float (&)[N].

The C++ standard library generic algorithms (such as std::sort) work on templated iterator range and as pointers are a model of the iterator concept C-style arrays & strings can be used with them as well this is done through static (compile-time) polymorhism that templates can give you.

[Edited by - snk_kid on August 7, 2005 3:36:39 PM]

Thanks for the reply snk_kid,
Let me expand on my original question. What if rather than using a matrix I used a structure myStructure. I then create an array of type myStructure. How would I make myStructure conform or meet the requirements of a sort function call?

DG

You can either implement operator< for your structure, or pass a comparison functor as an extra argument to the sort call. That last argument is actually defaulted to be an instance of the class "std::less", which is a comparison functor which basically says "use the class' operator<". All you need for the comparison functor is an overload of "operator()" which accepts two instances of the structure to be compared (by const reference), and returns a bool (which is true iff the first parameter should come before the second in the sorted result).

Quote:

Original post by Zahlman That last argument is actually defaulted to be an instance of the class "std::less", which is a comparison functor which basically says "use the class' operator<".

Algorithms like std::sort are actually overloaded the version that does not take a custom predicate assumes the value type supports the relational less than operator and doesn't use std::less. The version that takes a custom predicate doesn't have a default value too.

Anyways i'm not sure if thats what he wants to do as he originally said he wants to sort the elements of each individual row/column vec of a matrix where row/column vec is representated by a user-defined type. If that is the case then he could do something like this:



But that might have issues with alignment.

thank you snk_kid,
it works great.

dg