The Weekly Challenge

Advent Calendar 2019

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The gift is presented by Adam Russell. Today he is talking about his solutions to Task #2: Priority Queue of “The Weekly Challenge - 018”.

Write a script to implement Priority Queue. It is like regular queue except each element has a priority associated with it. In a priority queue, an element with high priority is served before an element with low priority. Please check this wiki page for more informations. It should serve the following operations:

1) is_empty: check whether the queue has no elements.

2) insert_with_priority: add an element to the queue with an associated priority.

3) pull_highest_priority_element: remove the element from the queue that has the highest priority, and return it. If two elements have the same priority, then return element added first.

PriorityQueue.pm is doing all the work for the task.


use strict;
use warnings;

package PriorityQueue{
    use boolean;
    use Class::Struct;

    package Node{
        use Class::Struct;
        struct(
            priority => q/$/,
            data => q/$/
        );
    }

    package Heap{
        use Class::Struct;
        struct(
            nodes => q/@/,
            length => q/$/
        );
    }
    struct(
        heap => q/Heap/,
        length => q/$/
    );

    sub initialize{
        my($self) = @_;
        my $heap = new Heap(
            nodes => [],
            length => 0
        );
        $self->heap($heap);
    }

    sub is_empty{
        my($self) = @_;
        return @{$self->heap()->nodes()};
    }

    sub insert_with_priority{
        my($self, $priority, $data) = @_;
        my $i = $self->heap()->length() + 1;
        my $j = int($i / 2);
        while($i > 1 && $self->heap()->nodes()->[$j]->priority() > $priority){
            $self->heap()->nodes->[$i] = $self->heap()->nodes()->[$j];
            $i = $j;
            $j = int($j / 2);
        }
        $self->heap()->nodes()->[$i] = new Node();
        $self->heap()->nodes()->[$i]->priority($priority);
        $self->heap()->nodes()->[$i]->data($data);
        $self->heap()->length($self->heap()->length + 1);
    }

    sub pull_highest_priority_element{
        my($self) = @_;
        if(!$self->is_empty()){
            return undef;
        }
        my $data = $self->heap()->nodes()->[1]->data();
        $self->heap()->nodes()->[1] = $self->heap()->nodes()->[@{$self->heap()->nodes()} + 1];
        $self->heap()->length($self->heap()->length() - 1);
        my $i = 1;
        while($i != $self->heap()->length() + 1){
            my $k = $self->heap()->length + 1 ;
            my $j = $i * 2;
            if($j <= $self->heap()->length()
               &&
              ($self->heap()->nodes()->[$j]->priority() < $self->heap()->nodes->[$k]->priority())){
               $k = $j;
            }
            if($j + 1 <= $self->heap()->length()
               &&
              ($self->heap()->nodes()->[$j + 1]->priority() < $self->heap()->nodes->[$k]->priority())){
                $k = $j + 1;
            }
            $self->heap()->nodes()->[$i] = $self->heap()->nodes()->[$k];
            $i = $k;
        }
        return $data;
    }
    true;
}

Node and Heap are packages defined within the PriorityQueue package. All packages use Class::Struct, even the PriorityQueue package. The implementation of a PriorityQueue follows the classic C style approach which inspired the use of Class::Struct to begin with. It turns out Class::Struct is quite versatile and works with use overload.

The script ch-2.pl looks like below:

use PriorityQueue;

my $pq = new PriorityQueue();
$pq->initialize();
$pq->insert_with_priority(7, "sleep");
$pq->insert_with_priority(4, "go to the gym");
$pq->insert_with_priority(3, "work on blog");
$pq->insert_with_priority(5, "drink water");
$pq->insert_with_priority(1, "eat pizza");
$pq->insert_with_priority(2, "work on perl weekly challenge");
$pq->insert_with_priority(6, "clean dishes");

for(0 .. 6){
    my $data = $pq->pull_highest_priority_element();
    printf("$data\n");
}

SAMPLE RUN

$ perl -I. ch-2.pl
eat pizza
work on perl weekly challenge
work on blog
go to the gym
drink water
clean dishes
sleep

If you have any suggestion then please do share with us perlweeklychallenge@yahoo.com.

Advent Calendar 2019