I’m learning about data structures and abstract data types, and I keep getting stuck on one question that keeps coming up.
I don’t understand how computer science can be 50 years old now (or older, I don’t know exactly) and how data structures, ADTs, and algorithms can be such a foundational part of it all, yet still there is no standard to any of it.
My question is actually pretty specific: I’m trying to implement depth-first-search in C++ in a way that can work on any native (built-in) data-type. My question is, where do I look first? I know the stack class from the STL can be used to implement the DFS algorithm, but is the STL the first place to look? Should I be implementing DFS from scratch, using a stack and what I know about implementing this algorithm? Or do professional programmers have a library they turn to when they need to pursue this kind of search?
Please advise, this question isn’t as concrete as I’d like it to be.
Boost has a C++ depth first search implementation here:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_42_0/libs/graph/doc/depth_first_search.html