If binomial heaps are represented as collections of trees, why does this implementation just have one tree?

Question

This Wikipedia article about binomial heaps says that binomial heap is a collection of binomial trees.

But this implementation uses only one tree. So I'm confused - is this implementation a binomial heap? If so, how does it get away with just using one tree?

Answer 1

The implementation you've linked is not actually a binomial heap. It's actually a binary heap. You can see this from operations like bubble_up and bubble_down, which are used in binary heaps rather than binomial heaps, and the fact that it's represented as an array, something that you do with binary heaps but not binomial heaps.

Hope this helps!