[LeetCode] Kth Smallest Element in a BST

This link suggests a concise C++ recursive solution. The original code may be hard to understand at first and I have rewritten the code below. You may need to run some examples with it to see how it works.

 1 class Solution {
 2 public:
 3     int kthSmallest(TreeNode* root, int k) {
 4         return smallest(root, k);
 5     }
 6 private:
 7     int smallest(TreeNode* node, int& k) {
 8         if (!node) return -1;
 9         int val = smallest(node -> left, k);
10         if (!k) return val;
11         if (!--k) return node -> val;
12         return smallest(node -> right, k);
13     }
14 };

The same author also posts three solutions which is more space-efficient in this link. All of them reduce the O(n) space of the above code to O(k) space by using some nice data structures.

Personally I really love the soltuion using deque and I have rewritten it below.

 1 class Solution {
 2 public:
 3     int kthSmallest(TreeNode* root, int k) {
 4         TreeNode* node = root;
 5         deque<TreeNode*> nodes;
 6         while (true) {
 7             while (node) {
 8                 nodes.push_front(node);
 9                 if (nodes.size() > k)
10                     nodes.pop_back();
11                 node = node -> left;
12             }
13             node = nodes.front();
14             nodes.pop_front();
15             if (!--k) return node -> val;
16             node = node -> right;
17         }
18     }
19 };