Data Structures

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“Data structure is a specialized format for organizing and storing some data. Generally Data Structure types include array, file, record, table, tree, and so on. Interview Questions and Answers about any data structure is designed to organize your data to suit a specific knowledge so that it can be help full to you in your career. Data Structures Interview Questions and Answers are a simple guide to learn the basics of the Data Structures.”



48 Data Structures Questions And Answers

2⟩ What is the data structures used to perform recursion?

Stack. Because of its LIFO (Last In First Out) property it remembers its caller, so knows whom to return when the function has to return. Recursion makes use of system stack for storing the return addresses of the function calls. Every recursive function has its equivalent iterative (non-recursive) function. Even when such equivalent iterative procedures are written, explicit stack is to be used.

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4⟩ What is data structure?

A data structure is a way of organizing data that considers not only the items stored, but also their relationship to each other. Advance knowledge about the relationship between data items allows designing of efficient algorithms for the manipulation of data.

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6⟩ What is the heap in data structures?

The heap is where malloc(), calloc(), and realloc() get memory.

Getting memory from the heap is much slower than getting it from the stack. On the other hand, the heap is much more flexible than the stack. Memory can be allocated at any time and deallocated in any order. Such memory isn't deallocated automatically; you have to call free().

Recursive data structures are almost always implemented with memory from the heap. Strings often come from there too, especially strings that could be very long at runtime. If you can keep data in a local variable (and allocate it from the stack), your code will run faster than if you put the data on the heap. Sometimes you can use a better algorithm if you use the heap faster, or more robust, or more flexible. Its a tradeoff.

If memory is allocated from the heap, its available until the program ends. That's great if you remember to deallocate it when you're done. If you forget, it's a problem. A memory leak is some allocated memory that's no longer needed but isn't deallocated. If you have a memory leak inside a loop, you can use up all the memory on the heap and not be able to get any more. (When that happens, the allocation functions return a null pointer.) In some environments, if a program doesn't deallocate everything it allocated, memory stays unavailable even after the program ends.

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8⟩ What is the quickest sorting method to use?

The answer depends on what you mean by quickest. For most sorting problems, it just doesn't matter how quick the sort is because it is done infrequently or other operations take significantly more time anyway. Even in cases in which sorting speed is of the essence, there is no one answer. It depends on not only the size and nature of the data, but also the likely order. No algorithm is best in all cases. There are three sorting methods in this author's toolbox that are all very fast and that are useful in different situations. Those methods are quick sort, merge sort, and radix sort.

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9⟩ How can I search for data in a linked list?

Unfortunately, the only way to search a linked list is with a linear search, because the only way a linked list's members can be accessed is sequentially. Sometimes it is quicker to take the data from a linked list and store it in a different data structure so that searches can be more efficient.

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11⟩ What is a spanning Tree in data structure?

A spanning tree is a tree associated with a network. All the nodes of the graph appear on the tree once. A minimum spanning tree is a spanning tree organized so that the total edge weight between nodes is minimized.

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13⟩ What is placement new in data structures?

When you want to call a constructor directly, you use the placement new. Sometimes you have some raw memory that’s already been allocated, and you need to construct an object in the memory you have. Operator new’s special version placement new allows you to do it.

class Widget

{

public :

Widget(int widgetsize);

Widget* Construct_widget_int_buffer(void *buffer,int widgetsize)

{

return new(buffer) Widget(widgetsize);

}

};

This function returns a pointer to a Widget object that’s constructed within the buffer passed to the function. Such a function might be useful for applications using shared memory or memory-mapped I/O, because objects in such applications must be placed at specific addresses or in memory allocated by special routines.

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17⟩ What is the easiest sorting method to use in data structures?

The answer is the standard library function qsort(). It's the easiest sort by far for several reasons:

It is already written.

It is already debugged.

It has been optimized as much as possible (usually).

Void qsort(void *buf, size_t num, size_t size, int (*comp)(const void *ele1, const void *ele2));

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