The first and next procedures are used by the backtracking algorithm to enumerate the children of a node c of the tree, that is, the candidates that differ from c by a single extension step. The call first(P,c) should yield the first child of c, in some order; and the call next(P,s) should return the next sibling of node s, in that order. Both functions should return a distinctive "null" candidate, denoted here by 'Λ', if the requested child does not exist.