Programming Algorithms: Linked Lists

This is a snippet of the "Lists" chapter of the book.

Linked data structures are in many ways the opposite of the contiguous ones that we have explored to some extent in the previous chapter using the example of arrays. In terms of complexity, they fail where those ones shine (first of all, at random access) — but prevail at scenarios when a repeated modification is necessary. In general, they are much more flexible and so allow the programmer to represent almost any kind of a data structure, although the ones that require such level of flexibility may not be too frequent. Usually, they are specialized trees or graphs.

The basic linked data structure is a singly-linked list.

Just like arrays, lists in Lisp may be created both with a literal syntax for constants and by calling a function — make-list — that creates a list of a certain size filled with nil elements. Besides, there's a handy list utility that is used to create lists with the specified content (the analog of vec).

CL-USER> '("hello" world 111)
("hello" WORLD 111)
CL-USER> (make-list 3)
(NIL NIL NIL)
CL-USER> (list "hello" 'world 111)
("hello" WORLD 111)

An empty list is represented as () and, interestingly, in Lisp, it is also a synonym of logical falsehood (nil). This property is used very often, and we'll have a chance to see that.

If we were to introduce our own lists, which may be quite a common scenario in case the built-in ones' capabilities do not suit us, we'd need to define the structure "node", and our list would be built as a chain of such nodes. We might have wanted to store the list head and, possibly, tail, as well as other properties like size. All in all, it would look like the following:

(defstruct list-cell
  data
  next)

(defstruct our-own-list
  (head nil :type (or list-cell null))
  (tail nil :type (or list-cell null)))

CL-USER> (let ((tail (make-list-cell :data "world")))
           (make-our-own-list
            :head (make-list-cell
                   :data "hello"
                   :next tail)
            :tail tail))
#S(OUR-OWN-LIST
   :HEAD #S(LIST-CELL
            :DATA "hello"
            :NEXT #S(LIST-CELL :DATA "world" :NEXT NIL))
   :TAIL #S(LIST-CELL :DATA "world" :NEXT NIL))

More details about of the book may be found on its website.