Monday, October 09, 2006

Teaching listless lists...

How Does One Teach Totally Disconnected Students?

I am about to teach my students something about linked lists, a fascinating topic thanks to
Donald Knuth's book ("The Art of Computer Programming"). It is apparently an unfinished book, Knuth keeps updating it all the while, Ramprasad tells me. Would my students read it? Anyway, I just finished the logic behind the linked lists, stackes, queues, and deques ('decks' as they are called). Here is what is stuck in my foggy brain:
  1. One tries to process data inside the computer, most likely it is some kind of a data table.
  2. Not only the data, but the interconnection between various elements are of importance, we process the information related to these inter-relationships.
  3. For example, a 1-dimensional array of data could be sorted or searched...
  4. The data could also be a 2-D image, or some higher dimensional object. Or it could have a tree-like structure, or even more complex...
  5. So, a linked list representing all the data is the most general type: stacks, queues, deques.
  6. Ah, and lastly, I learnt to pronounced 'deque' correctly (it is like 'deck', dummy!)

There are some gory details of malloc/calloc that I have been reading, oh well. I will use them and then write more about them...

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