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"We do not have a general purpose tree editor because trees are quite the complicated structure, and most valuable operations on trees require quite a bit of kn

"We do not have a general purpose tree editor because trees are quite the complicated structure, and most valuable operations on trees require quite a bit of knowledge of what the tree represents." Definitely...Also, trees are pretty abstract data structures. You can imagine a min-heap as a tree but for practical purposes you can also think of it as an array where there are special rules for interacting with elements (adding, removing, finding the child of a node, etc). It could be a pain to try to generalize something so abstract and with so much room for complexity by making a tree editor... It's the same reason why UI's for software development haven't taken off. When something is that abstract and complicated, it's almost harder interacting with an interface that tries to 'dumb it down'. Not to mention the lack of control such interfaces would introduce.

JadeNB 13y ago
> Also, trees are pretty abstract data structures. You can imagine a min-heap as a tree but for practical purposes you can also think of it as an array where there are special rules for interacting with elements (adding, removing, finding the child of a node, etc). This seems to be a bit of a red herring: you can think of an array as a contiguous region of bare bits in memory where there are special rules for interacting with elements—and similarly for any data structure—but that point of view doesn't seem to be the most useful (except possibly, in the array case, for programming in C).