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Elist Essay

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“An arrayList is a dynamic array. The back of the arrayList can grow as new elements are added.” (Ford & Topp). You can think of an arrayList as an improvement to using standard arrays, this is because arrays cannot increase or decrease in size as it stores elements in a fixed-length block, which means the sizes stays the same once the program is executed. On the other hand, an arrayList allows the addition or subtraction of its sequence using either the add() or remove() methods. Similarly, arrayLists occupy a contagious block of memory which has all existing elements already stored on it and extra space for additional elements to be added. Once the additional space is all used up the add() operation creates a new block of memory to store …show more content…

Each node is stored anywhere in memory. The representation of a linkedList is quiet simple, it relies on the collaboration of many objects. The first node in the list is known as the head or also first, the linked list instance must keep a reference of the first node, it would be impossible to locate the list without it. The end of the list is known as the tail; it is the last element that Is stored in the list. The way you can identify the tail is from its reference pointer which will be null meaning there isn’t another node to point to, that’s when you will know that it is the end of the list. You can find the tail by going through the entire list until the pointer returns null. to make this a more efficient task the linkedList keeps track of how many nodes exist so you can hop to the last pointer more efficiently this is also known as the size of list. Here is an illustration of a linkedList. Above is an example of a singly linked list, the node at the front is the head which is the first in the list it contains the info stored inside it and also the value of the reference to the next node with is shown here with an arrow pointing to the next element and so forth. Finally, the end node which is the tail references to null. An important trait of a linkedList is that it does not contain a predetermined size meaning inserting a new element at the start of the

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