Experimental Comparison of Array-based and Linked-based List Implementations

Abstract

Lists are one of the most often used containers in practice. They provide an easy way to store and access elements of arbitrary type. The list is suitable for a wide range of use cases including problems that involve the processing of a considerably high number of elements. Such situations are common in, for example, medical databases or in reliability analysis tools. There exist two principal approaches to the implementation of the list. One is based on the use of an array and the other one on the use of linked nodes. The question of which implementation to use often raises heated debates amongst scholars and programmers. The paper aims to compare the standard implementations in scenarios testing basic list operations. Also, the paper presents how we use similar scenarios to teach computational complexities and data structures comparison within the course of Algorithms and Data Structures at the Faculty of Management Science and Informatics of University of Zilina.