disjoint set ADTs
White: What good is a disjoint set ADT, anyways?
Black: Oh no, you've been reading Cormen et al.'s Introduction to Algorithms again, haven't you?
White: So many ackermann functions... the alphas are starting to make my head twirl.
Black: You just use the disjoint set ADT to group things together.
White: But... don't I already have that? Can't I just... group things... by making groups?
/ White takes out some hay. She puts the hay in separate stacks. /
White: There... done. And in O(1) time relative to the size of the original haystack, to boot!
Black: Yeah, here's where the "computer" part of "computer science" comes in ...
/ A bulldozer comes and blasts the hay into oblivion. /
White: ...What was that?
Black: I dunno. Segfault. Read error, array index out of bounds, something like that.
White: aAugh
/ White quietly weeps at her decision to become a computer science major. /
White: Why does everything hate me
Black: There there, it's alright. Someday, you'll be able to pass the hatred on to the next generation of programmers!