Performing Breadth First Search recursively

Question

Let\'s say you wanted to implement a breadth-first search of a binary tree recursively. How would you go about it?

Is it possible using only the call-stack

Answer 1

Here's a Scala 2.11.4 implementation of recursive BFS. I've sacrificed tail-call optimization for brevity, but the TCOd version is very similar. See also @snv's post.

import scala.collection.immutable.Queue

object RecursiveBfs {
  def bfs[A](tree: Tree[A], target: A): Boolean = {
    bfs(Queue(tree), target)
  }

  private def bfs[A](forest: Queue[Tree[A]], target: A): Boolean = {
    forest.dequeueOption exists {
      case (E, tail) => bfs(tail, target)
      case (Node(value, _, _), _) if value == target => true
      case (Node(_, l, r), tail) => bfs(tail.enqueue(List(l, r)), target)
    }
  }

  sealed trait Tree[+A]
  case class Node[+A](data: A, left: Tree[A], right: Tree[A]) extends Tree[A]
  case object E extends Tree[Nothing]
}