A connection between real-life and programmatic queues

Queues are an intuitive concept that can easily be related to our everyday life, such as when you stand in line to board a plane at the airport. In an actual line of people, you will see the following:

  • People typically enter at one end of the line and exit from the other end
  • If person A enters the line before person B, person A will also leave the line before person B (unless person B has more priority)
  • Once everyone has boarded the plane, there will be no one left in the line. In other words, the line will be empty

In computer science, a queue works in a considerably similar way:

  • Elements can be added to the end of the queue; this task is called enqueue.
  • Elements can also be removed ...

Get Advanced Python Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.