"here's the interesting part: at the end of my delete function, i return the successor node (referred to as $curr). if i have a receiver for the returned $curr node outside of my program, everything works fine."


Within RBDelete, you're telling $node's parent to point to $curr. $curr is local to RBDelete. If you don't store the-node-formerly-known-as-$curr outside the scope of RBDelete by capturing the return value, the parent of your deleted node will be pointing to undef.

In reply to Re: help! red-black binary tree problem by Daedalus207
in thread help! red-black binary tree problem by frustrated_intern

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