Thread: Pointers, useful? Please explain!

Originally Posted by RealityFusion

Other then that though I am still trying to figure out the point of binary trees and more advanced data structures.

Efficiency. Consider the following two structures

Code:

[1][8][4][7][6][2][9][3][5][0]

Code:

           [5]
         /     \
      [2]       [8]
      / \       / \
   [1]   [3] [7]   [9]
   /         /
[0]       [6]

In the first structure, the furthest data is 10 iterations away. In the second structure, it's only 4.