Column 3: Data Structures Programs
Most programmers have seen them, and most good programmers realize they’ve written at least one. They are huge, messy, ugly programs that should have been short, clean, beautiful programs. I’ve seen several programs that boil down to code like this
if (k == 1) c001++if (k == 2) c002++ ...if (k == 500) c500++
Although the programs actually accomplished slightly more complicated tasks, it isn’t misleading to view them as counting how many times each integer between 1 and 500 was found in a file. Each program contained over 1000 lines of code. Most programmers today instantly realize that they could accomplish the task with a program just a tiny fraction of the size by using a different data structure — a ...
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