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A data structure known as a hash table.. In computer science, a data structure is a data organization and storage format that is usually chosen for efficient access to data. [1] [2] [3] More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data, [4] i.e., it is an algebraic structure about data.
Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs [1] is a 1976 book written by Niklaus Wirth covering some of the fundamental topics of system engineering, computer programming, particularly that algorithms and data structures are inherently related.
This is a list of well-known data structures. For a wider list of terms, see list of terms relating to algorithms and data structures. For a comparison of running times for a subset of this list see comparison of data structures.
Here are time complexities [5] of various heap data structures. The abbreviation am. indicates that the given complexity is amortized, otherwise it is a worst-case complexity. For the meaning of "O(f)" and "Θ(f)" see Big O notation. Names of operations assume a max-heap.
The next step is to use the correspondences between the two data structures to create a program structure that is capable of processing the input data structure and producing the output data structure. (Sometimes this isn't possible. See the discussion of structure clashes, below.)
The structure of these data descriptions determines the organization of the program. Then, the book carefully introduces data forms of progressively growing complexity. It starts with data of atomic forms and then progresses to compound forms, including data that can be arbitrarily large. For each kind of data definition, the book explains how ...
Purely functional data structures are often represented in a different way to their imperative counterparts. [78] For example, the array with constant access and update times is a basic component of most imperative languages, and many imperative data-structures, such as the hash table and binary heap, are based on arrays.
An important application of recursion in computer science is in defining dynamic data structures such as lists and trees. Recursive data structures can dynamically grow to a theoretically infinite size in response to runtime requirements; in contrast, the size of a static array must be set at compile time.