Same fringe

Write a routine that will compare the leaves ("fringe") of two binary trees to determine whether they are the same list of leaves when visited left-to-right. The structure or balance of the trees does not matter; only the number, order, and value of the leaves is important.

Any solution is allowed here, but many computer scientists will consider it inelegant to collect either fringe in its entirety before starting to collect the other one. In fact, this problem is usually proposed in various forums as a way to show off various forms of concurrency (tree-rotation algorithms have also been used to get around the need to collect one tree first). Thinking of it a slightly different way, an elegant solution is one that can perform the minimum amount of work to falsify the equivalence of the fringes when they differ somewhere in the middle, short-circuiting the unnecessary additional traversals and comparisons.

Any representation of a binary tree is allowed, as long as the nodes are orderable.

Perl 6

Here we use pair notation for our "cons" cell, and the gather/take construct to traverse the leaves lazily. The === value equivalence is applied to the two lists in parallel via the Z ("zip") metaoperator. The all junctional predicate can theoretically short-circuit if any of its arguments are false, though current implementations tend to process in large enough batches that a strictly lazy solution is not guaranteed. <lang perl6>sub samefringe($a,$b) { all fringe($a) Z=== fringe($b) }

sub fringe ($tree) { gather fringeˊ($tree), take Any } multi fringeˊ (Pair $node) { fringeˊ $node.key; fringeˊ $node.value; } multi fringeˊ (Any $leaf) { take $leaf; }</lang> Testing: <lang perl6>my $a = 1 => 2 => 3 => 4 => 5 => 6 => 7 => 8; my $b = 1 => (( 2 => 3 ) => (4 => (5 => ((6 => 7) => 8)))); my $c = (((1 => 2) => 3) => 4) => 5 => 6 => 7 => 8;

my $x = 1 => 2 => 3 => 4 => 5 => 6 => 7 => 8 => 9; my $y = 0 => 2 => 3 => 4 => 5 => 6 => 7 => 8; my $z = 1 => 2 => (4 => 3) => 5 => 6 => 7 => 8;

say so samefringe $a, $a; say so samefringe $a, $b; say so samefringe $a, $c;

say not samefringe $a, $x; say not samefringe $a, $y; say not samefringe $a, $z;</lang>

Output:

True
True
True
True
True
True