Algorithm Design Questions Medium
The main difference between a binary tree and a binary search tree lies in their structural properties and the ordering of their elements.
A binary tree is a hierarchical data structure in which each node has at most two children, referred to as the left child and the right child. The nodes in a binary tree can be arranged in any order, and there are no specific rules or constraints regarding the values stored in the nodes. This means that a binary tree can have any arrangement of elements, and it may or may not be ordered.
On the other hand, a binary search tree (BST) is a specific type of binary tree that follows a particular ordering property. In a BST, for every node, all elements in its left subtree are smaller than the node's value, and all elements in its right subtree are greater than the node's value. This ordering property allows for efficient searching, insertion, and deletion operations. It enables us to perform binary search operations on the tree, hence the name "binary search tree."
To summarize, the key difference between a binary tree and a binary search tree is that a binary tree can have any arrangement of elements, while a binary search tree follows a specific ordering property that allows for efficient searching.