This is the order in which a binary search tree should be traversed for ordered output, i.e.:
- everything to the left is smaller than parent
- everything to the right is larger than parent
This ordering makes sense for binary trees and not k-ary trees in general because if there are more than two nodes it is not clear what the top node should go in the middle of.
This is unlike pre-order depth-first search and post-order depth-first search which generalize obviously to general trees.