pyicl is a python package that exposes the functionality of boost.icl to python using boost.python. Documentation: http://packages.python.org/PyICL/ PyPi page: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/PyICL/ boost.icl is a general purpose interval container library written in C++. Its author, Joachim Faulhaber, describes it thus: "Intervals are almost ubiquitous in software development. Yet they are very easily coded into user defined classes by a pair of numbers so they are only implicitly used most of the time. The meaning of an interval is simple. They represent all the elements between their lower and upper bound and thus a set. But unlike sets, intervals usually can not be added to a single new interval. If you want to add intervals to a collection of intervals that does still represent a set, you arrive at the idea of interval_sets provided by this library. Interval containers of the ICL have been developed initially at Cortex Software GmbH to solve problems related to date and time interval computations in the context of a Hospital Information System. Time intervals with associated values like amount of invoice or set of therapies had to be manipulated in statistics, billing programs and therapy scheduling programs. So the ICL emerged out of those industrial use cases. It extracts generic code that helps to solve common problems from the date and time problem domain and can be beneficial in other fields as well. One of the most advantageous aspects of interval containers is their very compact representation of sets and maps. Working with sets and maps of elements can be very inefficient, if in a given problem domain, elements are typically occurring in contiguous chunks. Besides a compact representation of associative containers, that can reduce the cost of space and time drastically, the ICL comes with a universal mechanism of aggregation, that allows to combine associated values in meaningful ways when intervals overlap on insertion." Regards, John.