This page discusses the heap data structure. For the place where memory is dynamically allocated from, see dynamic memory allocation.
In computer science a heap is a specialized tree-based data structure. Its base datatype (used for node keys) must be an ordered set.
Let A and B be nodes of a heap, such that B is a child of A. The heap must then satisfy the following condition (heap property):
- key(A) ≥ key(B)
Heaps are used in the sorting algorithm called heapsort.
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