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$Id: README,v 1.2 1998/03/25 01:32:26 gray Exp $
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BACKGROUND:

This Skiplist library was written by Bill Pugh from the Department of
Computer Science and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies,
University of Maryland.  It is a generic alternative to balanced trees
with a significantly simpler implementation with low power overhead
and other benefits.

The library in its initial form was designed for strings only.  It has
been heavily hacked by Gray Watson to make it handle abstract data
types, to improve code readability, and to improve general library
functionality.

You also can mmap a skiplist directly from disk for high performance
access of a read-only list.  To get mmap functions you will need to
remove the NO_MMAP flag from the Makefile.  You may have the play with
the mmap defines to get it to compile on your system.

See the skip_t.c file for usage examples and skip.h for the function
prototypes and comments.  Initial reference source code and
documentation about the skiplist principles can be found in the docs/
directory.

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INSTALLATION:

1) Typing 'make' should be enough to build libskip.a.

2) Typing 'make tests' should make the skip_t test program.

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REPOSITORY:

The newest versions of the library are available via anonymous ftp
from ftp.letters.com in the /src/skip directory.

	ftp://ftp.letters.com/src/skip/

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AUTHOR:

If you have any questions or problems feel free to send me mail.

Gray Watson
http://256.com/gray/

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