Hunsberger, Peter wrote:
> Which still leaves the original question; once you've got a way of
> managing and manipulate graphs, why would you need a way to distinguish
> trees? What does recognizing the special case get you?
Because some things are true of trees which are not true of all graphs,
the algorithms to process them can be made simpler and/or faster. For
instance, you can do a depth first search or breadth first search
without worrying about cycle detection.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
XML in a Nutshell 3rd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xian3/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596007647/cafeaulaitA/ref=nosim
