Not sure, never looked, but deleting downwards is a simpler process, it's walking a tree, in effect, pulling the rug out from under you as you go.

To delete upwards, the most efficient way would be to generate tables of items to be deleted, then delete them. You would not lose anything.

Deleting upwards could also be done by creating your linked hash and deleting leaf nodes in several passes. If the process ever stopped, there would be no broken trees. You have to walk the whole tree, then start deleting leaf nodes. This can potentially crash a system, if the tree to be deleted is large, because the whole tree, or pointer references, have to be stored as a data structure. Hence, the table suggestion above.

This is bringing back bad memories of computer science classes two decades ago.


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