Leaf
See: Leaves
A leaf is a node in a tree data structure that has no child nodes. It represents the endpoint of a path from the root through the tree, effectively marking the outermost bounds of the structure. In binary trees, a leaf is specifically a node where both the left and right child references are null. The concept of a leaf is crucial across various types of trees, including binary trees, trie trees, and more complex structures like B-trees. Leaves often hold significant data or represent final states in applications such as file directories, decision trees, and syntactic analysis. Identifying leaf nodes is essential for tree traversal algorithms, such as depth-first search (DFS) and breadth-first search (BFS), where they typically signify the base case or a termination condition.