DATA STRUCTURES
Data may be organized in many different ways logical or mathematical model of a program particularly organization of data. This organized data is called “Data Structure”. Or The organized collection of data is called a ‘Data Structure’. Data Structure involves two complementary goals. The first goal is to identify and develop useful, mathematical entities and operations and to determine what class of problems can be solved by using these entities and operations. The second goal is to determine representation for those abstract entities to implement abstract operations on this concrete representation.
Linear data structures organize their data elements in a linear fashion, where data
elements are attached one after the other. Linear data structures are very easy to
implement, since the memory of the computer is also organized in a linear fashion. Some
commonly used linear data structures are arrays, linked lists, stacks and queues.In Nonlinear data structures, data elements are not organized in a sequential fashion. Data structures like multidimensional arrays, trees, graphs, tables and sets are some examples of widely used nonlinear data structures. Operations on the Data Structures: Following operations can be performed on the data structures:
- Traversing
- Searching
- Inserting
- Deleting
- Sorting
- Merging
2. Searching- It is used to find out the location of the data item if it exists in the given collection of data items.
3. Inserting- It is used to add a new data item in the given collection of data items.
4. Deleting- It is used to delete an existing data item from the given collection of data items.
5. Sorting- It is used to arrange the data items in some order i.e. in ascending or descending order in case of numerical data and in dictionary order in case of alphanumeric data.
6. Merging- It is used to combine the data items of two sorted files into single file in the sorted form.