June 2009
Intermediate to advanced
288 pages
5h 59m
English
This chapter describes properties of binary relations, such as transitivity and symmetry. In particular, we introduce total and weak linear orderings. We introduce the concept of stability of functions based on linear ordering: preserving order present in the arguments for equivalent elements. We generalize min and max to order-selection functions, such as the median of three elements, and introduce a technique for managing their implementation complexity through reduction to constrained subproblems.
A relation is a predicate taking two parameters of the same type:

A relation is transitive ...