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[Simon St.Laurent] > (Tom Passin had it slightly easier, I think, as he was mostly moving from > trees to graphs, but the shift was still noticeable.) > Yes, but it was really hard to re-create a pseudo-tree for display purposes, once the graph was constructed. Going into Extreme, I still had a bug in that part that I have now been able to correct. > Overall, my suspicion is that graph serialization is far more > challenging than tree serialization, as the worst complication in tree > serialization is the need to add (sometimes arbitrary) order to the > parts of the tree which aren't considered ordered. There are a lot of issues, partly because people have different purposes for doing so. Also, a graph can have different type of substructures. Some of them might be more-or-less hierarchical and some not. For example, if you have a graph that includes a taxonomy, you will probably be able to pull out a tree for the taxonomy part (assuming that the taxonomy really is a tree!), because you can traverse down the class-subclass or whatever relationships. But other parts of the graph may not resemble hierarchies that much, and you may have other reasons for serializing them. > Graph serialization > offers far more choices about different ways of representing connections > as well as the general problem of unrolling circular connections into a > straight-line sequence of bits. > Graph algorithms tend to "mark" each node as it is traversed. This is well and good, but finding a good starting point can be the hardest part. For other purposes, getting the neighborhood around a node is more useful that forcing the graph into a serialization or tree. It just depends on what you want to do. Cheers, Tom P
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