Both of these structures are a special kind of binary tree called a heap, which means "a disorganized pile." This is in contrast to binary search trees that can be thought of as a highly organized pil...Both of these structures are a special kind of binary tree called a heap, which means "a disorganized pile." This is in contrast to binary search trees that can be thought of as a highly organized pile. This very fast implementation is the basis of one of the fastest known sorting algorithms, namely heapsort (see Section 11.1.3). It supports a \(\mathtt{meld(h)}\) operation that allows the priority queue to absorb the elements of a second priority queue \(\mathtt{h}\).
