Concatenating Approach: Improving the Performance of Data Structure Implementation

Abstract

Data structures are important parts of the programs. Most programs use a variety of data structures and quality of data structures excessively affects the quality of the applications. In current programming languages, they are defined by storing a reference to the data element in the data structure node. Some shortcomings of the current approach are limits in the performance of a data structure and poor mechanisms to handle key and hash attributes. These issues can be observed in the Java programming language which that dictates the programmer to use references to data element from the node. Clearly it is not an implementation mistake. It is a consequence of the Java paradigm which is common in almost all object-oriented programming languages. This paper introduces a new mechanism called access method, to implement a data structure efficiently which is based on the concatenating approach to data structure handling. In the concatenating approach, one memory block stores both the data element and the data structure node. According to the obtained results, the number of lines in the access method is reduced and reusability is increased. It builds data structure efficiently. Also it provides suitable mechanisms to handle key and hash attributes. Performance, simplicity, reusability and flexibility are the major features of the proposed approach.