title: Is a Trie a K-ary tree?
body: <p>If you look at the node definitions for a simple Trie and a simple K-ary tree, they look the same.</p>
  
  <p><em>(using C++ notation)</em></p>
  
  <pre><code>template &lt;size_t K&gt;
  trieNode
  {
      trieNode *[K]
  };
  
  template &lt;size_t K&gt;
  KaryNode
  {
      KaryNode *[K]
  };
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>At its simplest a K-ary tree has multiple children per node (2 for a binary tree)</p>
  
  <p>And a Trie has "multiple children per node"</p>
  
  <p>It seems that a K-ary tree makes it's choice of child based on comparison( &lt; or > ) of Keys</p>
  
  <p>While a Trie makes it's choice of child based on (unary) equality of sub-spans of the Key</p>
  
  <p>Since neither data structure has made it into any standards, what would be best definition of each, and how would they be differentiated?</p>