BST
From wikipedia:
In computer science, a binary search tree (BST), which may sometimes also
be called an ordered or sorted binary tree, is a node-based binary tree
data structure which has the following properties:
1) The left subtree of a node contains only nodes with keys less than the
node's key.
2) The right subtree of a node contains only nodes with keys greater than
the node's key.
3) Both the left and right subtrees must also be binary search trees.
The major advantage of binary search trees over other data structures is
that the related sorting algorithms and search algorithms such as in-order
traversal can be very efficient.
Binary search trees are a fundamental data structure used to construct more
abstract data structures such as sets, multisets, and associative arrays.
The BST library implements a simple binary search tree. A tree can be created as follows:
tree = Tree.new(1) #note an initial value is required to create a tree
After the tree has been created, there are several operations that can be performed on it:
tree.add(4) #add a new value
tree.remove(4) #remove a value
tree.contains?(4) # => false
Additionally, the BST::Tree object has two different traversal methods that are used to return a string representing the entire tree in order and in reverse order.
puts tree.to_s #prints out the tree in-order, from smallest value to largest
puts tree.to_s_reverse #prints out the entire tree in reverse order, from largest to smallest
The cool thing about the traversal algorithms are how simple they are and how easily they lend themselves to recursion. Below is the in_order_traversal method definition:
def in_order_traversal node, ary
if node.left
in_order_traversal(node.left,ary) #traverse left subtree (look at elements smaller than root of current subtree)
end
ary << node.value # add root of current subtree to our array
if node.right
in_order_traversal(node.right,ary) #traverse right subtree (look at elements larger than root of current subtree)
end
end