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The Tree Data Model

2016

Abstract

There are many situations in which information has a hierarchical or nested structure like that found in family trees or organization charts. The abstraction that models hierarchical structure is called a tree and this data model is among the most fundamental in computer science. It is the model that underlies several programming languages, including Lisp. Trees of various types appear in many of the chapters of this book. For instance , in Section 1.3 we saw how directories and files in some computer systems are organized into a tree structure. In Section 2.8 we used trees to show how lists are split recursively and then recombined in the merge sort algorithm. In Section 3.7 we used trees to illustrate how simple statements in a program can be combined to form progressively more complex statements. The following themes form the major topics of this chapter: 3 The terms and concepts related to trees (Section 5.2). 3 The basic data structures used to represent trees in programs (Sect...