Introduction

In this module, we will reintroduce the data structures that we have seen and implemented throughout CC 315 as well as CC 310. We will discuss the running time for various operations as well as space requirements for each structure.

You may recall that in CC 310, we did a similar comparison. We will use most of the same operations from that module so we can draw comparisons between the structures in CC 310 and CC 315.

• Insert – inserting a specific element into the structure, either in sorted order, or at the appropriate place as required by the definition of the data structure.
• Access – accessing a desired element. For general data structures, this is the process of accessing an element by its index or key in the structure. For stacks and queues, this was the process of accessing the next element to be returned.
• Find – this is the process of finding a specific element in the data structure, usually by iterating through it or using a search method if the structure is ordered in some way.
• Delete – this is the process of deleting a specific element in the case of a general-purpose structure or deleting and returning the next element in the case of a stack or queue. For more advanced structures, this may also require the structure to be reorganized a bit.

We will also also discuss the memory required for each structure.