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Abstract View of Data StructuresDescriptionFor abstract data structures two things are important:
The concept of logical inspectability refers to exposure of all state information of a data structure which is part of it's logic description. For example, the state of a stack is made up of all elements of the stack including their order and the current size of the stack. A stack has methods to push a new element on the stack, to access the current top element, to test whether there are elements stored in the stack and to remove the top element. To expose the whole state of the stack means, that there are also access methods to get all elements of the stack. However, it is not possible to change these elements or to add or remove elements at a different position than the stack's top. Correspondingly, the stack is not required to expose any information about the underlying container used to implement the stack: This can e.g. be a list or a vector but this does not matter for the stack's state. Copyright © 1999 Dietmar Kühl (dietmar.kuehl@claas-solutions.de) Claas Solutions GmbH |