August 2017
Intermediate to advanced
222 pages
5h 3m
English
Content preview from A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and AlgorithmsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
Queues
A queue also deals with temporary data elegantly, and is like a stack in that it is an array with restrictions. The difference lies in what order we want to process our data, and this depends on the particular application we are working on.
You can think of a queue as a line of people at the movie theater. The first one on the line is the first one to leave the line and enter the theater. With queues, the first item added to the queue is the first item to be removed. That’s why computer scientists use the acronym “FIFO” when it comes to queues: First In, First Out.
Like stacks, queues are arrays with three restrictions (it’s just a different set of restrictions):
-
Data can only be inserted at the end of a queue. (This is identical behavior ...