Storing in Multiway Trees

Abstract

Suppose, as usual, that we have a collection of records each of which has, among many others, a field Key of some ordered type. In thinking of a way to generalise the binary search tree structure, whose usefulness has been described in the previous Chapter, we might be tempted to introduce a structure made up of nodes each having a fixed number n of children (which are again structures of the same type or possibly empty) and containing n − 1 records—binary trees correspond to the case n = 2. It turns out that it is better not to be quite so restrictive, but rather to require only that each node have at most n children and contain one fewer record than it has children.