Scaling coordinates

Sometimes we want to iterate over all coordinates of points in some space. In many cases the distance between points is not important, what is important is their relative order of occurrence along axis. Then we can scale {-5, 0, 5} to {0,1,2} for example along x-axis. Quite often this makes it possible to implement a static interval tree along the axis, which can be useful for some application. Here is really nice an compact code in C++ that achieves that:

vector < int > scale(vector < int > v) {
    vector < int > X = v;
    map < int, int > M;
    sort(X.begin(), X.end());
    X.erase(unique(X.begin(), X.end()), X.end());
    int nc = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < X.size(); ++i) M[X[i]] = nc++;
    for (int i = 0; i < v.size(); ++i) v[i] = M[v[i]];
} 

Hope you will find this one helpful!