Data Structures - Structuring Abstract
July 15th, 2007 — VyomaAs we came to the end of the Journey Of Code series, we moved on from the realm of hardware and stepped into the world of software - the abstract world. Software can be called abstract because there is really no physical structure for it. And these abstract concepts can easily become disorganized.
The software can be broadly classified to be code and data. When we say data - it is meant the whole concept of storing the data, and also how the data is stored.
The data structures are protocols or concepts that say how the data is stored. By storing it in a particular way - a particular operation on the data is optimized in terms of memory required and also time required to perform the operation. A well designed data structure needs to perform set of operations using as few resources (time and memory) as possible.
You must realize though, that there is no ideal type of data structure to this date. Every data structure has its own set of advantages and disadvantages based on the operations it is subjected to. That is the reason why there are different data structures which are used in situations where they perform the best.
The different data structures are made up of units called native data types and references. They are called by different names in different languages. By using these units in a certain way, different kinds of data structures can be constructed.
Some of the types of data structures are as follows.
- linked lists
- queues
- stacks
- trees
- graphs
This is not a exhaustive list - there are many more.
But we can look at some of them - and that is what we will be doing in the posts that will follow in this series.
July 20th, 2007 at 12:15 am
[...] Data structures give order to the abstract world of code (software). There are many types of data structure. Among them linked list is the most fundamental type of data structure. Using one or another form of linked list, other data structures (queues or stacks for example) can be created. [...]
July 26th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
[...] have been looking into data structures in this series. First we looked at linked list, and then a specialization of it - the queue. The [...]
July 29th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
[...] time, we will look at yet another data structure - tree. The structure of the tree is quite different from the linked list. Going into details of [...]