Visualization of Data Structures with Animation of Code

Abstract

Abstract Data structures play a major role in software development. However, data structures can be very tricky to understand. The best way to understand data structures is to incorporate them into action. Commonly, the data structures are learned by implementing in ‘C’. Pointers in ‘C’ create another hurdle in learning. The proposed research work has developed a tool that helps in the interactive visualization of a user input code. Here, this paper proposes a web-based tool that takes ‘C’ program as the input from the user and does computations on it and finally creates animation of the respective data structures as well as the code. This helps the user to execute the one line code at a time and view the corresponding changes to the data structures. It provides features such as the animation of simple user programs in ‘C’ consisting of pointers, user-defined structures, and operations such as traversal, insertion and deletion in linked lists. This research work proposes to show the synchronized animation of code and schematic diagram for the linked list as a proof-of-concept.KeywordsData structuresVisualizationCode animationPLYPointersLinked lists