[peripatein]

Hi,
I wrote the following recursion for finding the distance between a root and a leaf in a binary tree, but am not quite sure how to make it work. Could anyone please advise?

int calc_depth(Node* root, Node* leaf)
{
	if (!root)
		return 0; 
	if (leaf->right == root || leaf->left == root)
		return 1;
	return (leaf->right ? calc_depth(root, leaf->right) : calc_depth(root, leaf->left));
}

[salem]

Also here
Pick ONE forum and stick to it.

[peripatein]

Originally Posted by salem

Also here
Pick ONE forum and stick to it.

Why should I limit myself to one forum? Different groups, different people, different rationales/opinions etc.

[salem]

read this FAQ - all of it

If your question on two forums gets the SAME answer twice in both places, then someone completely WASTED their time reading and answering your post.

FREE time is a valuable resource you shouldn't be idly wasting. Now consider that someone else's post may in fact go unanswered because of you - do you still feel good about it?

You're getting FREE support here, the last thing you should be doing is provably wasting peoples time by this selfish "my post is very important, it deserves to be cross-posted" attitude.

[peripatein]

There is really no attitude! I see it this way, not only is this a very simple, straightforward question which should certainly not consume much time, but there are enough qualified people on both forums together to provide answers to all questions. It is rather rare that a question is left unanswered, and if it so happens it is even far more rare that it is because someone posted a simple question like mine elsewhere. If it means that much to you, I could remove it. But please note that I find this somewhat unnecessary and petty (no offense).

[Homi@th]

:cool:

Just thinking. At the root, you got depth = 0. You ask dept from left, how far from leaf it is. You ask the right too. Somewhere is your leaf...If found, return 1 and plus 1 for founder.

Pseudo code:

howdepth(root, leaf)
{
      if  ( leaf found)  return 1

      left_depth = 0
       if (left_node !=NULL) 
               d = howdepth( left_node, leaft)
               if (d >0 )
                      left_depth = 1+d
               end if
       end if

      right_depth = 0
       if ( right_node !=NULL) 
               d = howdepth( right_node, leaft)
               if (d >0)
                       right_depth = 1+d
               end if
       end if

    depth = max(left_depth, right_depth)

    return  depth 
}