Data Structures
In the context of red-black trees, a leaf is a node that does not have any children, meaning it is at the end of a branch in the tree structure. Leaves play a crucial role in maintaining the properties of red-black trees, such as balancing and efficient searching. They contribute to the overall structure by determining the height of the tree and ensuring that all paths from the root to the leaves have similar lengths, which is essential for optimal performance in operations like insertion, deletion, and lookup.
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