infinite loop while counting size of tree with circular references about binarytree HOT 2 CLOSED

Hi @crazywkb,

Your cycle function seems to have a bug (it will never terminate if the input is not falsy), but I get your point. I prefer option 2 as it doesn't try to hide anything from the users. The earlier the users discover that their tree has a problem the better. I will look into adding a circular dependency check in the next release. Thanks for bringing this up!

from binarytree.

There is already a way to validate the tree (including circular dependency checks) via binarytree.Node.validate. After some thought, I decided to leave it up to the user to call this validate method explicitly rather than calling it in all methods like len.

The reasoning is as follows:

1. I've seen this library being used to teach students. The teacher, for example, may want to intentionally trigger an infinite loop or a break the binary tree for educational/demonstration purposes. A far-fetched example, but the point is that I'd rather give the users the freedom of choice.
2. Extra computation required for every method.

from binarytree.