16 Facts About Linked list

In computer science, a linked list is a linear collection of data elements whose order is not given by their physical placement in memory.

Principal benefit of a linked list over a conventional array is that the list elements can be easily inserted or removed without reallocation or reorganization of the entire structure because the data items need not be stored contiguously in memory or on disk, while restructuring an array at run-time is a much more expensive operation.

LISP, standing for Linked list processor, was created by John McCarthy in 1958 while he was at MIT and in 1960 he published its design in a paper in the Communications of the ACM, entitled "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I".

Technique known as XOR-linking allows a doubly linked list to be implemented using a single link field in each node.

An empty Linked list is a Linked list that contains no data records.

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Insertion or deletion of an element at a specific point of a Linked list, assuming that we have indexed a pointer to the node already, is a constant-time operation, whereas insertion in a dynamic array at random locations will require moving half of the elements on average, and all the elements in the worst case.

However, the linked list will be poor at finding the next person to remove and will need to search through the list until it finds that person.

Balanced tree has similar memory access patterns and space overhead to a linked list while permitting much more efficient indexing, taking O time instead of O for a random access.

Singly linked linear list is a recursive data structure, because it contains a pointer to a smaller object of the same type.

In Lisp, for example, every proper Linked list ends with a link to a special node, denoted by nil or, whose CAR and CDR links point to itself.

Simplest representation for an empty circular Linked list is a null pointer, indicating that the Linked list has no nodes.

For example, when scanning the Linked list looking for a node with a given value x, setting the sentinel's data field to x makes it unnecessary to test for end-of-Linked list inside the loop.

Traversal of a singly linked list is simple, beginning at the first node and following each next link until we come to the end:.

Linked list can be built by creating an array of these structures, and an integer variable to store the index of the first element.

Skip list is a linked list augmented with layers of pointers for quickly jumping over large numbers of elements, and then descending to the next layer.

An unrolled linked list is a linked list in which each node contains an array of data values.