It is a useful tool for indicating the logical properties of data type. It is a collection of values & a set of operations on those values. Methodically, "a TYPE is a set, & elements of set are Values of that type".
ADT List
A list of elements of type T is finite sequence of elements of type T together with the operations of, update, create,delete, testing for full,testing for empty, finding the size, traversing the elements.
In defining Abstract Data Type, we are not concerned with time or space efficiency as well as regarding implementation details. The elements of a list might be characters,integers, real numbers & combination of multiple data types.
Consider a real world problem, where we have a company and we want to store the details of employees. To store the details, we need a data type which can store the type details containing the name of employee, date of joining etc. The list of employees may increase depending on the recruitment and may decrease on retirements or termination of employees. For making it simple and for better understanding purpose, we are only taking the name of employee field and ignoring the date of joining etc. The operations we must perform on this list of employees are creation, insertion, deletion, visiting, etc. We described employee_list as
typedefstruct
{
char name[20];
...................
......................
} emp_list;
The Operations on emp_list can be defined as
Create_emplist (emp_list * emp_list )
{
/* we will be writing create function by taking help of 'C' programming language, here */
}
The list has been created & name is a valid entry in emplist, & position p specifies the position in the list where name must inserted insert_emplist (emp_list * emp_list , char *name, int position )
{
/* we will be writing insert function by taking help of 'C' programming language,Here */
}
delete_emplist (emp_list * emp_list, char *name)
{
/* we will be writing delete function by taking help of 'C' programming language,Here */
}
visit_emplist (emp_list * emp_list )
{
/* we will be writing visit function through taking help of 'C' programming language,here */
}
The list can be implemented through two ways: the contiguous (Array) implementation & the linked (pointer) implementation. In the contiguous implementation, the entries into the list are stored next to each other into an array. The linked list implementation uses pointers & dynamic memory allocation.