What is a heap in the context of data structures?

A heap in data structures is a specialized tree that satisfies the heap property:

• In a max-heap, the value of each node is greater than or equal to the values of its children.
• In a min-heap, the value of each node is less than or equal to the values of its children.

A heap is usually implemented as a binary tree and is used for efficiently obtaining the maximum or minimum, as well as for implementing priority queues.

Example of application: heap sort algorithm and task scheduling with priorities.

It is important not to confuse the heap data structure with the "heap" memory area in memory management — these are different concepts.