traversal review in trees

Different traversals offer pros and cons when working with BSTs, depending on the use case.

Preorder

• Uniquely identifies a BST
• Hybrid depth approach that biases toward giving data closer to the root faster than data in leaf nodes

Inorder

• Most notable property is that if implemented on a BST the data is returned sorted
• The inorder traversal is the only one that does not uniquely define a BST
• If implemented on a regular binary tree the data is just given left-to-right

Postorder

• This is similar to preorder and uniquely identifies a BST
• When removing data it will only remove from the leaf nodes
• This is a hybrid depth approach that biases data in leaf nodes faster than giving data closer to root

Levelorder

• This is easiest to understand
• Gives the data in an ordering sorted based on the depth of each level
• Uniquely identifies a BST and gives data in a sorted manner on a per-level basis