Abstract
Putting the right data structure into a slow program can work the same wonders as transplanting fresh parts into a sick patient. Important classes of abstract data types such as containers, dictionaries, and priority queues have many functionally equivalent data structures that implement them. Changing the data structure does not affect the correctness of the program, since we presumably replace a correct implementation with a different correct implementation. However, the new implementation may realize different trade-offs in the time to execute various operations, so the total performance can improve dramatically. Like a patient in need of a transplant, only one part might need to be replaced in order to fix the problem.
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© 2020 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
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Skiena, S.S. (2020). Data Structures. In: The Algorithm Design Manual. Texts in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54256-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54256-6_3
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