Linked-Arrays: A Mathematical Approach

Abstract

Arrays and linked-lists serve as fundamental data structures, each with distinct advantages and limitations. Arrays, with their contiguous memory allocation, offer efficient data access. Similarly, linked-lists, connected via pointers, allow dynamic insertion and deletion. Both are linear data structures and have specific advantages as well as limitations such as, binary search cannot be applied on linked-list. There also exists a hybrid data structure in which, data field of node is replaced with array but still binary search in not applicable. In this work, a hybrid data structure of array & linked-list called as “Linked-Arrays” has been proposed along with an algorithm called “Spiral-Traversal Algorithm”, which allows applying binary search on Linked-Arrays. The performance of Linked-Arrays varies between performances of its parent data structures & hence, possess most of the advantages of both.