Description
A rope is a binary tree. Leaf nodes (as well as some single-child internal nodes) contain a short string. Each node has a "weight" equal to the length of its string plus the sum of all the weights in its left subtree. Thus a node with two children divides the whole string into two parts: the left subtree stores the first part of the string. The right subtree stores the second part and its weight is the sum of the left child's weight and the length of its contained string.
The binary tree can be seen as several levels of nodes. The bottom level contains all the nodes that contain a string. Higher levels have fewer and fewer nodes. The top level consists of a single "root" node. The rope is built by putting the nodes with short strings in the bottom level, then attaching a random half of the nodes to parent nodes in the next level. Nodes with no parent (for example, the two nodes storing the strings "my_" and "me_i" in the diagram above) become the right child of the node located immediately to their left, thus forming a chain.
Read more about this topic: Rope (computer Science)
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