python interval tree
EDIT: added a couple points inline. I'm obsessed with trees lately -- of the CS variety, not the plant variety. Although we are studying poplar, so I'll be using trees to study trees . I'd tried a couple times to implement an interval tree from scratch following the Wikipedia entry . Today I more or less did that in python. It's the simplest possible form. There's no insertion (though that's trivial to add), it just takes a list of 'things' with start and stop attributes and creates a tree with a .find() method. The wikipedia entry that baffled me was about storing 2 copies of each node's intervals --one sorted by start and the other by stop. I didn't do that as I think in most cases it won't improve lookup time. I figure if you have 1 million elements and a tree of depth 16, then you have on average 15 intervals per node (actually fewer since there are the non-leaf nodes). So I just brute force each of those nodes and move to the next. I th