How Does Dynamic Heap Storage Have Something to Do with Heap?
Heap memory and the heap data structure are two different and unrelated things. This really bothered me when I was learning about memory, especially since stack memory was actually a stack. The original use of the word heap in computer science referred to the data structure. However, in the 1970s some authors began to use the word heap to refer to the pool of available memory. This use actually more closely matches the English definition of heap - an untidy collection of things - since heap memory is a messy place to allocate and deallocate memory. The name stuck and now we have multiple meanings for the word heap.