My son wants to know if "too many if-s" would slow the code down

The submitted Python code for merging two binary trees is logically correct but suffers from excessive redundancy due to the repeated "if" conditions. These conditions check for various combinations of null nodes, but they don't need to be repeated multiple times.

This Python code attempts to merge two binary trees by recursively combining nodes with the same positions from both trees. The key function, mergeTrees, takes two roots as input, root1 and root2, and returns the merged tree. Within this function, there’s a helper function, f(a, b), that handles the recursive merging process.

However, the implementation has a significant issue: redundancy. The helper function contains a repetitive sequence of conditional checks:

if not a and not b:
    return
if a and not b:
    return a
if not a and b:
    return b

This pattern is unnecessarily repeated many times, inflating the code size and reducing readability. These checks only need to be written once at the start of the recursion. After handling these cases, the function should combine the nodes by creating a new node with the sum of a.val and b.val, and recursively merging the left and right children.

The overall idea behind the code is solid — merging two trees by adding corresponding node values and handling null nodes properly — but the implementation could be drastically simplified. Removing the redundancy would make the code more elegant and easier to maintain.

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