C Primer Plus, Fourth Edition

Structures: What Next?

Before ending our exploration of structures, we would like to mention one of the more important uses of structures: creating new data forms. Computer users have developed data forms much more efficiently for certain problems than the arrays and simple structures we have presented. These forms have names such as queues, binary trees, heaps, hash tables, and graphs. Many such forms are built from linked structures. Typically, each structure contains one or two items of data plus one or two pointers to other structures of the same type. Those pointers link one structure to another and furnish a path to enable you to search through the overall tree of structures. For example, Figure 14.3 shows a binary tree structure, with ...