A cardinal tree (or
trie
In computer science, a trie, also called digital tree or prefix tree, is a type of ''k''-ary search tree, a tree data structure used for locating specific keys from within a set. These keys are most often strings, with links between nodes ...
) of degree ''k'', by analogy with
cardinal number
In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality (size) of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number: the number of elements in the set. T ...
s and by opposition with
ordinal trees, is a rooted tree in which each node has positions for an edge to a child.
[
"Representing trees of higher degree" (2005)
by David Benoit, Erik D. Demaine, J. Ian Munro, Rajeev Raman, Venkatesh Raman and S. Srinivasa Rao]
Each node has up to children and each child of a given node is labeled by a unique integer from the set {1, 2, . . . , k}. For instance, a
Binary Tree, binary tree is a cardinal tree of degree 2.
References
Data types
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Knowledge representation
Abstract data types