Comparative Study of Recursive and Non-Recursive Approach in TREE Traversal

Tree traversal is a technique which involves visiting, verifying, and updating each node in a tree just once. This paper gives insight on the various approaches for the same. The tree can be visited in two ways recursively and non-recursively. This paper initiates an exploratory analysis between recursive and non-recursive algorithms for inorder, preorder, and postorder traversals. The execution time and the space-time complexity are analysed. Although the recursive approach performs efficiently in accordance with the time complexity. The non-recursive approach is given more weightage for specific occasions. In this frame of reference, this paper offers to answer the pertinent questions - which approach performs better? and when to use which approach? This paper can not only serve as a guide for researchers but also for programmers who aim on storing information and representing hierarchical data but also throws light on providing efficient algorithms for insertion, deletion, and searching.