Data Structures-Elementary notes
Data Structure, a basic and the most important topic to talk about. Let’s first try to understand the title ‘DATA structures’. Once again as mentioned in the previous story and my most favorite approach of understanding by throwing the three questions.
We can comfortably start by asking why is it called ‘DATA structure’? what is a data structure? and how does it make sense?
Before answering the first question let’s look at what is data?
Data is anything that can be defined with a quality or a quantity. Representation of the data can be achieved by Data Type — something that categorizes the data. Data types and Data structures are two different concepts, one is to classify data and the other is to process data we’ll be talking about it in detail further.
There are two data types :
- Built-in Data Type: The ones which support any language are built-in data types. A few most common ones have been listed down:
- Integer: This is used to define a wide range of integer numbers. These integer numbers can be positive or negative which are represented by signed or unsigned integers. Integers are stored as 0’s or 1’s in a computer which is basically binary digit groups called bits. Depending on the size of the binary groups we decide to use which integer convention to use like a nibble, byte, short, long, double, word, etc., Usually integer data type with storage size of 2–4 bytes can hold values of range -32,768 to 32,767 or -2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647.
- Character: This is used to define the letters, symbols, and even numbers. A character data type is represented by ‘char’ and has a storage of size 1 byte. for more details visit this
- String: Sequence of characters is a string. Once again strings can be used to define a sequence of letters, symbols, and numbers. Representation of string is ‘String’ and the number of bytes a string can take depends on the number of characters in that string plus one.
- Floating: Fractional values with high correctness are represented by float data type. The size of this data type is 4 bytes.
- Boolean: This data type holds either true or false. It not only holds only two types of data but also refers to how language is interpreted to machine language where logical 0 is false and any other positive value mostly 1 is true.
2. Derived Data Type: Data types like Structures, Queues, Stacks, etc., that are put up by a combination of built-in data types but will have a set of operations to perform on them (traversal, searching, insertion, deletion, merging and sorting). for more details visit this
Having defined what data and data types are, data structures have been introduced to process the data with their proper definitions, store and retrieve it efficiently based on one’s purpose while dealing with the data.
Making it clear with an example of the user-level file storage system, in this case, a computer might have files with different kinds of extensions i.e., files of different types, so considering files as data since it has a quality (the type of file) these files have to be processed, oriented and stored correctly in order to access or retrieve them when we need.
It means data structures give a plausible clear picture of the data like grammar does to any language by dealing with sense, placement, and structure of words.
Even though there are enormous numbers of data structures that are in existence the elementary ones are Arrays, Linked lists, Trees, Graphs, Hash tables, and Objects. The difference between the derived data types and data structures is that data types cannot be broken like leaves of a tree and data structure is the tree itself and consists of elements of different data types.
We will be discussing these elementary data structures in detail with examples in upcoming stories. 🙂
