Pointers in C Programming: A Modern Approach to Memory Management, Recursive Data Structures, Strings, and Arrays

© Thomas Mailund 2021

T. MailundPointers in C Programminghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6927-5_11

11. Linked Lists

Thomas Mailund¹  

(1)

Aarhus N, Denmark

 

We now change our focus to a different kind of data structures, so-called recursive data structures . Those are data structures defined in terms of themselves, and in C, the only way that you can implement them is through pointers. If you pick up a random algorithm book, more than half of the data structures described there will likely be recursive, so we obviously can only scratch the surface of this topic, but in this chapter and the following two, we will see some examples.

A recursive data structure is one that contains members of its own type. In this chapter, we look at linked lists, where ...