Mumbai University > Information Technology > Sem 3 > Data structure and algorithm analysis

Marks: 3M

Year: Dec 2015, May 2016

Linear Data Structure: Linear data structures organize their data elements in a linear fashion, where data elements are attached one after the other. Data elements in a liner data structure are traversed one after the other and only one element can be directly reached while traversing. Linear data structures are very easy to implement, since the memory of the computer is also organized in a linear fashion. Some commonly used linear data structures are arrays, linked lists, stacks and queues.

Non-Linear Data Structure: In nonlinear data structures, data elements are not organized in a sequential fashion. A data item in a nonlinear data structure could be attached to several other data elements to reflect a special relationship among them and all the data items cannot be traversed in a single run. Data structures like multidimensional arrays, trees and graphs are some examples of widely used nonlinear data structures.