Fundamental Elements of Data Structure

In present times, a device is designed such a way that it can make easy and speed up complex and time-consuming computations. In most of the applications, we store and access the huge amount of information, which could be done in organized way using Data structure.

In most of the cases, the vast amount of information which is to be developed in some sense signifies a concept of a part of reality. The information or data which is accessible to the computer consists of specific set of data which can be handled by the application. There are few sets of data which cannot be accessed and it is highly confidential. This can be achieved through the concept of Abstraction.

Here we see following concepts

• Characteristics of Data types in Data Structure
• Type of Data Structures
• Basic operations of Data Structures

Characteristics of Data types in Data Structure

The data type chooses the set of values which may be constant or a variable usually assigned by the programmer or assigned during the operations. The type of a value indicated by a constant or variable or expression may be resulting from its form or its declaration without the need of execution  of computational process.

Each operator and function expects some arguments of a fixed type which is achieved by assigning the data types to those specific arguments and yields a result of a fixed type.

Types of Data Structure

The Data types are characterized into three major types. They are:

Built-in data type: These are pre-defined data types and have a fixed set of rules for declaration. These data types belong to particular programming language as built-in support and hence they are called as built-in types. Examples of built-in data types are:

• Integer type
• Boolean type
• Character type
• Boolean type

Derived data type: These data types can be implemented independently in a programming language. These data types are built by combining primary and built-in data types. Examples of such data types are:

• Array
• Stack
• Queue
• List

It is recommended to use C/C++ for better implementation of these derived data types.

Basic Operations of Data Structure

There are some basic operations of Data Structure such as

• Traversing
• Searching
• Insertion
• Deletion
• Sorting
• Merging

The derived data type is chosen mostly depends on the number of occurrence of the operation which needs to carried out on the data structure.