figure determining is not in the heap after inspecting the nodes of level figure living and dead space in the heap backing array if you have followed the advice we gave in the deletion algorithm then heap that has been mutated several times will contain some form of default value for items no longer in the heap potentially you will have at most lengthof (heaparraycount garbage values in the backing heap array data structure the garbage values of course vary from platform to platform to make things simple the garbage value of reference type will be simple and for value type figure shows heap that you can assume has been mutated many times for this example we can further assume that at some point the items in indexes actually contained references to live objects of type in figure subscript is used to disambiguate separate objects of from what you have read thus far you will most likely have picked up that traversing the heap in any other order would be of little benefit the heap property only holds for the subtree of each node and so traversing heap in any other fashion requires some creative intervention heaps are not usually traversed in any other way than the one prescribed previously summary heaps are most commonly used to implement priority queues (see ss for sample implementationand to facilitate heap sort as discussed in both the insertion ss and deletion ss sections heap maintains heap order according to the selected ordering strategy these strategies are referred to as min-heap