Binary Tree Labeling

We need to stop naming the descendants in a binary tree "left" and "right". Every tutorial on binary trees or BSTs I've ever seen uses these stupid naming convention. Giving a node the property of being on the left or right side is completely arbitrary and meaningless. Take a binary search tree for example. Instead of defining it like this:

struct Node {
    int   value;
    Node *left;
    Node *right;
}

use names that actually have a meaning given their intended purpose:

struct Node {
    int   value;
    Node *lessThan;
    Node *greaterOrEqual;
}

and if you prefer shorter names you can use lt and ge. This has the added benefit that you never need to think about on which "side" equal values go, the name provides all the information by itself.

Of course there are some cases where you need to define an ordering, for example when you want to visualize, but that is almost never the primary use of such a tree.