Oh gosh, that’s giving me flashbacks to one of my third semester computer science classes at college (Intro to C and Compiler Design).
One of the very early assignments was creating a red-black tree. Thankfully I was already pretty familiar with C, but I don’t think that was true for anyone else in class… totally super didn’t scar me or anyone else.
… and I literally only just now got the joke, oops 😅 if only we could all be left-leaning red-black trees
Not interested in being a tree at this point in my life tbh.
For the curious:
Interesting that this article title has a dash for left-leaning and a minus sign for red–black
I know there’s rules for when to use which. I’m not surprised that Wikipedia would care. I can’t keep them straight though.
am now thinking maybe the minus sign should be interpreted literally. like maybe there is some invariant involving the number of red nodes minus the number of black nodes along some path or within some group of nodes. not sure what that invariant would be though
Looked at Sedgewick’s history.
His dissertation was… “Quicksort”
Holy hell.
