Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Linked list implementations, especially one of a circular, doubly-linked list, can be simplified remarkably using a sentinel node to demarcate the beginning and end of the list. The list starts out with a single node, the sentinel node which has the next and previous pointers point to itself. This condition determines if the list is empty.
While doubly linked and circular lists have advantages over singly linked linear lists, linear lists offer some advantages that make them preferable in some situations. A singly linked linear list is a recursive data structure, because it contains a pointer to a smaller object of the same type.
The first and last nodes of a doubly linked list for all practical applications are immediately accessible (i.e., accessible without traversal, and usually called head and tail) and therefore allow traversal of the list from the beginning or end of the list, respectively: e.g., traversing the list from beginning to end, or from end to beginning, in a search of the list for a node with specific ...
C++'s Standard Template Library provides the class templates std::deque and std::list, for the multiple array and linked list implementations, respectively. As of Java 6, Java's Collections Framework provides a new Deque interface that provides the functionality of insertion and removal at both ends.
Circular buffering makes a good implementation strategy for a queue that has fixed maximum size. Should a maximum size be adopted for a queue, then a circular buffer is a completely ideal implementation; all queue operations are constant time. However, expanding a circular buffer requires shifting memory, which is comparatively costly.
Linked list. A doubly linked list has O(1) insertion and deletion at both ends, so it is a natural choice for queues. A regular singly linked list only has efficient insertion and deletion at one end. However, a small modification—keeping a pointer to the last node in addition to the first one—will enable it to implement an efficient queue.
A non-blocking linked list is an example of non-blocking data structures designed to implement a linked list in shared memory using synchronization primitives: Compare-and-swap; Fetch-and-add; Load-link/store-conditional; Several strategies for implementing non-blocking lists have been suggested.
The nodes of a linked data structure can also be moved individually to different locations within physical memory without affecting the logical connections between them, unlike arrays. With due care, a certain process or thread can add or delete nodes in one part of a data structure even while other processes or threads are working on other parts.