Editing Rope (data structure) (section)

==Description==
A rope is a type of [[binary tree]] where each leaf (end node) holds a string of manageable size and length (also known as a ''weight''), and each node further up the tree holds the sum of the lengths of all the leaves in its left [[subtree]]. A node with two children thus divides the whole string into two parts: the left subtree stores the first part of the string, the right subtree stores the second part of the string, and a node's weight is the length of the first part.

For rope operations, the strings stored in nodes are assumed to be constant [[immutable object]]s in the typical nondestructive case, allowing for some [[copy-on-write]] behavior. Leaf nodes are usually implemented as [[string (computer science)|basic fixed-length strings]] with a [[reference counting|reference count]] attached for deallocation when no longer needed, although other [[Garbage collection (computer science)|garbage collection]] methods can be used as well.