CSC148 Lecture Week 9

    Last week we covered linked lists in class. Linked lists can be though of a tree with airity of one. Each node has a value and a reference to another node or None if it is the end of the list. A wrapper class can then be used to keep track of the size of the list, the front node and the back node. Recursion can be used to traverse linked lists, but due to the more linear nature of the lists iteration works just as well. A while loop or for loop can be used to step through the list until you get to the desired node. The basic structure would look something like this:

cur_node = lnk.front

while cur_node:

    cur_node = cur_node.nxt

    I liked going back to iteration. It was nice to be able to use loops again and not have to think in a recursive manner. Working with linked lists also involves mutation. It is important to change things in the correct order so that you don't lost data. I found this part of linked lists to be manageable. What I found difficult was remembering to change the front, back and size data in the wrapper. I created a check list for the test, so hopefully I did everything properly on the test.