Question

I want to create a record that would hold the information about

• a) what kind of elements are present and
• b) the number of elements of each kind present

in a node of a tree. I would explicitly store this information only for the leaf nodes, while the information for the parent node can be obtaining through combining the information of all of it’s children (e.g. child 1 has 3 objects of A, 1 object of B, child 2 has 1 object of A, 2 objects of C — parent has 4 objects of A, 1 object of B and 2 of C).

I will be careful when requesting this information from the parent nodes not to first request, use and discard information for a child node and then for its parent node, but the upward construction will be a common operation. Other two common operations are directly derived from what I store: is the object of kind X present? and how many objects of kind X is present? and also how many kinds of objects are present?

Object kinds are represented as integers, and the object numbers are always integer values. What is the better choice (and arguments for the selected choice):

• use std::multiset<int>, and operate with std::multiset::count() and std::multiset::find() operations (easier union but duplication of elements, total distinct element count hard to obtain)
• use std::map<int, std::size_t> with the kind as a key and number of objects as a value (no duplicate elements, std::map::find() function present, size gives the correct number of object kinds stored, but accessing a non-existent element increases the size unintentionally)

Thank you for your suggestions!

Answer 1

To store a total of n items with k distinct values per your comparison predicate, an std::multiset allocates n binary search tree nodes(*). An std::map allocates only k (slightly larger) nodes.

You’d use std::multiset when two items can be considered equal by your comparison predicate, but must still be explicitly stored, because they differ in some aspect that the comparison predicate does not check. Also, iterating over a multiset generates each of the n items, whereas a map would generate each of the k distinct items with the count for each.

In the case where the items are just integers, go with std::map. Your “how many distinct items” query would then just be a call to size, which runs in constant time.

Your claim that “accessing a non-existent element increases the size unintentionally” is only true if you use operator[] to access nodes. find does not exhibit this behavior.

(*) The C++ standard does not guarantee that these containers are implemented as (balanced) BSTs, but in all implementations that I’ve seen, they are.