SAMS Teach Yourself C++ in 10 Minutes SECOND EDITION

A Unidirectional Linked List with Structures for the Tape

One of the interesting capabilities offered by allocating structures from the heap is that you can use a pointer in the structure to link structures together into a list (called a linked list). For instance, you can create an indefinitely long list of aTapeElement structures by adding a member variable to aTapeElement that is a pointer to the next aTapeElement:

struct aTapeElement
{
   char Operator;
   float Operand;
   aTapeElement *NextElement;
} ;

Then you can link them together, like this:

 1: aTapeElement Tape; 2: aTapeElement SecondElement = new aTapeElement; 3: Tape.NextElement = SecondElement; 4: aTapeElement ThirdElement = new aTapeElement; 5: Tape.NextElement->NextElement = ThirdElement; ...