I was curious how std:next_permutation
was implemented so I extracted the the gnu libstdc++ 4.7
version and sanitized the identifiers and formatting to produce the following demo...
#include <vector>
#include <iostream>
#include <algorithm>
using namespace std;
template<typename It>
bool next_permutation(It begin, It end)
{
if (begin == end)
return false;
It i = begin;
++i;
if (i == end)
return false;
i = end;
--i;
while (true)
{
It j = i;
--i;
if (*i < *j)
{
It k = end;
while (!(*i < *--k))
/* pass */;
iter_swap(i, k);
reverse(j, end);
return true;
}
if (i == begin)
{
reverse(begin, end);
return false;
}
}
}
int main()
{
vector<int> v = { 1, 2, 3, 4 };
do
{
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
{
cout << v[i] << " ";
}
cout << endl;
}
while (::next_permutation(v.begin(), v.end()));
}
The output is as expected: http://ideone.com/4nZdx
My questions are: How does it work? What is the meaning of i
, j
and k
? What value do they hold at the different parts of execution? What is a sketch of a proof of its correctness?
Clearly before entering the main loop it just checks the trivial 0 or 1 element list cases. At entry of the main loop i is pointing to the last element (not one past end) and the list is at least 2 elements long.
What is going on in the body of the main loop?