On Sun, 5 Jul 2020 at 10:10, Matthew Wilcox <willy6...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Erm, red-black trees don't have a derivation from gambling terminology > either. The wikipedia article says: > > In a 1978 paper, "A Dichromatic Framework for Balanced Trees",[6] Leonidas J. > Guibas and Robert Sedgewick derived the red-black tree from the symmetric > binary B-tree.[7] The color "red" was chosen because it was the best-looking > color produced by the color laser printer available to the authors while > working at Xerox PARC.[8] Another response from Guibas states that it was > because of the red and black pens available to them to draw the trees.[9] > > Left-right tree makes no sense. It doesn't distinguish the rbtree from its > predecessor the avl tree. I don't think it's helpful to rename a standard > piece of computing terminology unless it's actually hurting us to have it. > Obviously if it were called a "master-slave" tree, I would be in favour of > renaming it.
As I said "it means nothing if you've never interacted with gambling culture," red black in the context of the trees as zero meaning other than as a name to find it on the internet, Search for that name enough and you will undoubtedly be getting ads for online roulette sites within hours, if you have a problem gambling past, this might not be the desired effect you'd want. The reasons something was named a particular thing can and will be different from what a societal context for them means now, and I believe it's more important to worry about current societal contexts than legacy historical namings. I'm not seriously suggesting we rename red-black trees, but if someone who had a problematic gambling background had issues with them I'd definitely be open for considering it. Dave.
