Comp 210 Lab 5: Trees

Index: Binary Search Trees, Arithmetic Expressions

Trees are a very common form of data. In fact, lists are simply trees with at most one branch at each node. In lab, we'll see more uses of trees.

Binary Search Trees

We often want to be able to build a data structure that allows us to look up information based on some key value. One simple idea would be to just create a list of all the data items. The disadvantage is that it can then take a long time to find the items at the end of the list, since we have to look at all the prior items first. Many data structures can be used for this problem, one of which is a binary search tree.

For simplicity, let's assume we just want to keep track of a bunch of numbers, remembering which ones we've seen. From this, we could easily generalize our results to, for example, keeping track of team player information indexed by player number, or to indexing on names rather than numbers.

The following are some binary search trees for the numbers 1,3,4,6,9:

Each node holds a data item (here, number) and two possibly-empty subtrees. All the nodes in the left branch are less than the current node. All the nodes in the right branch are greater than the current node. The ordering of the nodes depends on how the tree is built.

To do:

Make a data definition for these binary search trees.
Develop a function search which consumes a binary search tree and a number and returns the boolean indicating whether the number is in the tree.
Develop a function insert which consumes a binary search tree and a number and returns a new binary search tree. It should contain all the number from the first tree, plus the new number, but the new number shouldn't be duplicated. Hint: The easiest option is to add the new node at the bottom of the appropriate branch.
Develop a function in-order which consumes a binary search tree and returns a list of the numbers in the tree in sorted order. You'll want to use the built-in function append to append lists together. Hint: Note that the leaves of the tree are sorted left-to-right.
Describe how long search and insert take in terms of the shape of the input tree.

Many operations on binary search trees would be faster if the trees were also balanced, i.e., the branches were all more-or-less equally deep. Implementing balanced binary trees is much more difficult, as you'll see in Comp 212.

Arithmetic Expressions

Arithmetic expressions can also be modeled as trees. For example, the Scheme expression

     (+ 5 (* (- 1 8) (+ 7 1)))

is pictorially

        +
      /   \
     5     *
         /   \
        -     +
       / \   / \
      1   8 7   1

We would like to treat this expression as a piece of data. This is just like how DrScheme works -- one of your programs is really just a big piece of data for DrScheme. For simplicity, we'll just work with two arguments at a time.

An A-Expression is one of the following:

n, where n is a number,
(make-add m n), where m, n are A-Expressions,
(make-sub m n), where m, n are A-Expressions,
(make-mul m n), where m, n are A-Expressions, or
(make-div m n), where m, n are A-Expressions.

I.e., the A-Expression (make-add ...) will represent the appropriate arithmetic expression involving addition. We use the name "A-Expression" to distinguish it from its meaning of an arithmetic expression you'd write on a piece of paper or type into DrScheme.

To do:

Make example data and a template for A-Expressions.
Develop the function evaluate which consumes an A-Expression and returns a number. Your function should be like the "little man" inside DrScheme, computing the number that the A-Expression represents.

DrScheme, like any language interpreter, is just a generalization of evaluate. A Scheme expression is like an arithmetic expression, but with more cases. You'll see more of this in an upcoming homework assignment.