On 05/20/08 12:04, John Femiani wrote: [snip]
Is a tree a good way to describe a path? I mean, the path itself is a basically a list of names right? Many of us think of the filesystem itself as a tree (whether it is or not, at least it is a digraph).
To me a path is a sequence (a list) of connected nodes in a graph (or tree), and this analogy shold hold with filesystem. A leaf is a node in a tree with no out-edges, and the last node in a path may or may not be a leaf.
This makes the most sense to me. A path, to paraphrase John, is nothing more than directions to a location in a tree. Whether the directions lead to a leaf or not depends on the "context" i.e. on the tree that's being traversed. So, I think back (or maybe last as *maybe* John was implying above with 'last node in a path') would be the best name for accessing the last component in the path.