Expression tree

A binary expression tree is a specific kind of a binary tree used to represent expressions. Two common types of expressions that a binary expression tree can represent are algebraic and boolean. These trees can represent expressions that contain both unary and binary operators.

Each node of a binary tree, and hence of a binary expression tree, has zero, one, or two children. This restricted structure simplifies the processing of expression trees.

The leaves of a binary expression tree are operands, such as constants or variable names, and the other nodes contain operators. These particular trees happen to be binary, because all of the operations are binary, and although this is the simplest case, it is possible for nodes to have more than two children. It is also possible for a node to have only one child, as is the case with the unary minus operator. An expression tree, T, can be evaluated by applying the operator at the root to the values obtained by recursively evaluating the left and right subtrees.

An algebraic expression can be produced from a binary expression tree by recursively producing a parenthesized left expression, then printing out the operator at the root, and finally recursively producing a parenthesized right expression. This general strategy (left, node, right) is known as an in-order traversal. An alternate traversal strategy is to recursively print out the left subtree, the right subtree, and then the operator. This traversal strategy is generally known as post-order traversal. A third strategy is to print out the operator first and then recursively print out the left and right subtree.

These three standard depth-first traversals are representations of the three different expression formats: infix, postfix, and prefix. An infix expression is produced by the inorder traversal, a postfix expression is produced by the post-order traversal, and a prefix expression is produced by the pre-order traversal.

When an infix expression is printed, an opening and closing parenthesis must be added at the beginning and ending of each expression. As every subtree represents a subexpression, an opening parenthesis is printed at its start and the closing parenthesis is printed after processing all of its children.

Pseudocode:

The postfix expression is formed by the basic postorder traversal of any binary tree. It does not require parentheses.

Pseudocode:

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