## Leftist Heaps

One efficient way to complete the merge algorithm outlined in the previous section revolves around the concept of the null path length of a tree, which is defined to be $0$ for empty trees, or one more than the minimum of the null path lengths of the children for nonempty trees. Another way to understand this concept is that it gives the minimum number of steps needed to get from the root to an empty subtree. For an empty tree, there is no root, so we somewhat arbitrarily define the null path length to be $0$. For single-node trees or binary trees with at least one empty child, the null path length is $1$ because only one step is needed to reach an empty subtree.

One reason that the null path length is important is that it can be shown that any binary tree with $n$ nodes has a null path length that is no more than $\lg(n + 1)$. Furthermore, recall that in the merging strategy outlined in the previous section, there is some flexibility in choosing which child of a node will be used in the recursive call. Because the strategy reaches a base case when one of the min-heaps is empty, the algorithm will terminate the most quickly if we do the recursive call on the child leading us more quickly to an empty subtree — i.e., if we use the child with smaller null path length. Because this length is logarithmic in the number of nodes in the min-heap, this choice will quickly lead us to the base case and termination.

A common way of implementing this idea is to use what is known as a leftist heap. A leftist heap is a binary tree that forms a heap such that for every node, the null path length of the right child is no more than the null path length of the left child. For such a structure, completing the merge algorithm is simple:

• For the recursive call, we merge the right child of s with b, where s and b are as defined in the previous section.
• When combining the root and left child of s with the result of the recursive call, we arrange the children so that the result is a leftist heap.

We can implement this idea by defining two classes, LeftistTree<T> and MinPriorityQueue<TPriority, TValue>. For the LeftistTree<T> class, we will only be concerned with the shape of the tree — namely, that the null path length of the right child is never more than the null path length of the left child. We will adopt a strategy similar to what we did with AVL trees. Specifically a LeftistTree<T> will be immutable so that we can always be sure that it is shaped properly. It will then be a straightforward matter to implement a MinPriorityQueue<TPriority, TValue>, where TPriority is the type of the priorities, and TValue is the type of the values.

The implementation of LeftistTree<T> ends up being very similar to the implementation we described for AVL tree nodes, but without the rotations. We need three public properties using the default implementation with get accessors: the data (of type T) and the two children (of type LeftistTree<T>). We also need a private field to store the null path length (of type int). We can define a static method to obtain the null path length of a given LeftistTree<T>. This method is essentially the same as the Height method for an AVL tree, except that if the given tree is null, we return 0. A constructor takes as its parameters a data element of type T and two children of type LeftistTree<T>. It can initialize its data with the first parameter. To initialize its children, it first needs to determine their null path lengths using the static method above. It then assigns the two LeftistTree<T> parameters to its child fields so that the right child’s null path length is no more than the left child’s. Finally, it can initialize its own null path length by adding 1 to its right child’s null path length.

Let’s now consider how we can implement MinPriorityQueue<TPriority, TValue>. The first thing we need to consider is the type, TPriority. This needs to be a type that can be ordered (usually it will be a numeric type like int). We can restrict TPriority to be a subtype of IComparable<TPriority> by using a where clause, as we did for dictionaries (see “Implementing a Dictionary with a Linked List").

We then need a private field in which to store a leftist tree. We can store both the priority and the data element in a node if we use a LeftistTree<KeyValuePair<TPriority, TValue>>; thus, the keys are the priorities and the values are the data elements. We also need a public int property to get of the number of elements in the min-priority queue. This property can use the default implementation with get and private set accessors.

In order to implement public methods to add an element with a priority and to remove an element with minimum priority, we need the following method:

private static LeftistTree<KeyValuePair<TPriority, TValue>>
Merge(LeftistTree<KeyValuePair<TPriority, TValue>> h1,
LeftistTree<KeyValuePair<TPriority, TValue>> h2)
{
. . .
}


This method consist of three cases. The first two cases occur when either of the parameters is null. In each such case, we return the other parameter. In the third case, when neither parameter is null, we first need to compare the priorities in the data stored in the root nodes of the parameters. A priority is stored in the Key property of the KeyValuePair, and we have constrained this type so that it has a CompareTo method that will compare one instance with another. Once we have determined which root has a smaller priority, we can construct and return a new LeftistTree<KeyValuePair<TPriority, TValue>> whose data is the data element with smaller priority, and whose children are the left child of this data element and the result of recursively merging the right child of this element with the parameter whose root has larger priority.

The remaining methods and properties of MinPriorityQueue<TPriority, TValue> are now fairly straightforward.