> Also, trees are pretty abstract data structures. You can imagine a min-heap as a tree but for practical purposes you can also think of it as an array where there are special rules for interacting with elements (adding, removing, finding the child of a node, etc).
This seems to be a bit of a red herring: you can think of an array as a contiguous region of bare bits in memory where there are special rules for interacting with elements—and similarly for any data structure—but that point of view doesn't seem to be the most useful (except possibly, in the array case, for programming in C).
This seems to be a bit of a red herring: you can think of an array as a contiguous region of bare bits in memory where there are special rules for interacting with elements—and similarly for any data structure—but that point of view doesn't seem to be the most useful (except possibly, in the array case, for programming in C).