On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 5:09 PM, Tara Athan wrote:
As to naming of trees, every published paper I have found so far that uses the term "rose tree" is consistent with the original definition from Meerten, who is the one who coined the name in the first place, to indicate a quite specialized tree that only has values at the tips, not the nodes.

I believe you mean Lambert Meertens here and are referring to the reference “First steps towards the theory of rose trees” [1]. Unfortunately, this article does not seem to be available online, but it does appear that articles citing Meertens use your definition.

It is only in Haskell-related literature that it is stated that rose tree is the same as multiway tree. Since there is a perfectly good name for multiway tree, I don't see why there would be any need to have another name for it - why not let the name "rose tree" be used for what it was originally intended.

I don't think there is a One True Definition for a rose tree. For example, Ralf Hinze uses a definition like the Data.Tree one in “Polytypic Functions Over Nested Datatypes” [2]. Also, Meertens himself uses the value-at-the-tips definition in a later publication [3].

BTW, I have a stake in this, as I am working on a case where I need (a generalization of ) rose trees, not multiway trees, and I ran across this different usage of "rose tree" during the literature search.

I wouldn't worry about which definition is the “right” one. Both are equally acceptable.

Regards,
Sean

[1] CWI, Amsterdam, 1988, Draft Rept. [SD-008].
[2] Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science 3, 1999, 193–214. http://www.dmtcs.org/dmtcs-ojs/index.php/dmtcs/article/view/109
[3] Calculate Polytypically! Proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Programming Languages: Implementations, Logics, and Programs
Pages, 1996, 1-16. http://www.kestrel.edu/home/people/meertens/publications/papers/Calculate_polytypically.pdf