A linked list is a recursive structure — a linked list node has a value, and a pointer to the next linked list node. This means we can solve problems on linked lists using structural recursion. In this post we’ll see three examples, to demonstrate the process of writing a structurally recursive algorithm.
Before attempting these exercises, you should read the posts about array-lists and linked lists.
When designing a data structure, there are always choices to make. In the previous post we described the array-list data structure implementing the list data type; in that post, we made the choice to store the list values in an “underlying array” so the list values would all be together in memory. In this post we’ll show that this really was a choice, by developing a list data structure which stores the list values in separate objects, rather than a single array object.