non-binary trees many organizations are hierarchical in naturesuch as the military and most businesses consider company with president and some number of vice presidents who report to the president each vice president has some number of direct subordinatesand so on if we wanted to model this company with data structureit would be natural to think of the president in the root node of treethe vice presidents at level and their subordinates at lower levels in the tree as we go down the organizational hierarchy because the number of vice presidents is likely to be more than twothis company' organization cannot easily be represented by binary tree we need instead to use tree whose nodes have an arbitrary number of children unfortunatelywhen we permit trees to have nodes with an arbitrary number of childrenthey become much harder to implement than binary trees we consider such trees in this to distinguish them from the more commonly used binary treewe use the term general tree section presents general tree terminology section presents simple representation for solving the important problem of processing equivalence classes several pointer-based implementations for general trees are covered in section aside from general trees and binary treesthere are also uses for trees whose internal nodes have fixed number of children where is something other than two such trees are known as -ary trees section generalizes the properties of binary trees to -ary trees sequential representationsuseful for applications such as storing trees on diskare covered in section general tree definitions and terminology tree is finite set of one or more nodes such that there is one designated node rcalled the root of if the set ( { }is not emptythese nodes are partitioned