An Open Ended Tree

Abstract

An open ended list is a well known data structure in Prolog programs. It is frequently used to represent a value changing over time, while this value is referred to from several places in the data structure of the application. A weak point in this technique is that the time complexity is linear in the number of updates to the value represented by the open ended list. In this programming pearl we present a variant of the open ended list, namely an open ended tree, with an update and access time complexity logarithmic in the number of updates to the value.