Specifically about graphs, you can look at:
http://nsl.com/papers/order.htm - topological sorting
http://nsl.com/k/tarjan.q - strongly connected components
http://nsl.com/k/loop.q - find loops in graphs
I think in all of these the graph is represented either as a list of edges or a dictionary of node->(list of nodes that it has edges to)
Unary over is the "fixed point"/"converge" adverb, which does
x <- f(x)
until x stabilizes (to within floating point tolerance if it is a float), returns to its first value, or goes through a requested number of iterations.The best example of this that I can think off is the K "flatten" idiom:
,//
read: "concat over, converge". That is, given a general list, it concatenates all its items promoting atoms to one-element lists - thus, flattening one level of the list; And then applies it again and again until there is no further change, thus flattening successive levels of the list.Is this the most efficient way to do this? No! in fact, for an unbalanced one sided list it will do O(n^2) where n is the number of items, with a best (and idiomatic Lisp/Haskell) solution being O(n), although it's usually 100 chars rather than 3.
But the actual code orchestrated by these 3 chars behind the scenes is all tight C loops, so for small n it will beat complex solutions. And it is all of 3 self-describing, easily remembered, easily recognized, easily optimized (if Arthur ever cared ...) characters. If you care about worst case, you can easily code the standard Lisp/Haskell solution just as you would in those languages. See [0] for more.
The underlying computational model fits sequential, parallel, SIMD, and almost every other paradigm much better than all the popular programming languages. Unfortunately, there's a learning curve that puts of most people (and is perhaps insurmountable to some people who have no problem with Python, Java, C or PHP) - it's much more Math-oriented.
[0] http://www.math.bas.bg/bantchev/place/k.html
edit: added [0] link and ref
DFS is then a variation of the more familiar functional style of tackling the problem where you have your end condition (i.e. something that matches what you're looking for) and failing that do something else (typically recursion).
I can't recall enough of the K syntax these days to actually implement that right now though, or if K has TCO.