Disk space is used economically because it is managed on a sector basis. Existing application programs will need modification to take advantage of the HPF'S's support for extended attributes and long filenames but these changes will not be difficult. All application programs will benefit from the HPFS's improved performance and decreased CPU use whether they are modified or not. This article is based on a prerelease version of the HPFS that was still undergoing modification and tuning. Therefore the final release of the HPFS may differ in some details from the description given here.
Most programmers are at at least passingly famiIiar with the data structure known as a binary tree.
Binary trees are a technique for imposing a logical ordering on a collection of data items by means of pointers, without regard to the physical order of the data. In a simple binary tree, each node contains some data, including a key value that determines the node's logical position in the tree, as well as pointers to the node's left and right sub trees. To find a particular piece of data, the binary tree is traversed from the root. Such simple binary trees, although easy to understand and implement, have disadvantages in practice. If keys are not well distributed or are added to the tree in a non-random fashion, the tree can become quite asymmetric, leading to wide variations in tree traversal times.