A First Book of ANSI C—ch13.pptVIP

Linux+ Guide to Linux Certification, Second Edition A First Book of ANSI C, Fourth Edition A First Book of ANSI CFourth Edition Chapter 13 Dynamic Data Structures Objectives Introduction to Linked Lists Dynamic Memory Allocation Stacks Queues Dynamically Linked Lists Common Programming and Compiler Errors Introduction Dynamic memory allocation: an alternative to fixed memory allocation in which memory space grows or diminishes during program execution Dynamic memory allocation makes it unnecessary to reserve a fixed amount of memory for a scalar, array, or structure variable in advance Also known as run-time allocation Requests are made for allocation and release of memory space while the program is running Introduction to Linked Lists An array of structures can be used to insert and delete ordered structures, but this is not an efficient use of memory Better alternative: a linked list Linked list: set of structures, each containing at least one member whose value is the address of the next logically ordered structure in the list Also known as self-referencing structures Introduction to Linked Lists (continued) Introduction to Linked Lists (continued) Introduction to Linked Lists (continued) A NULL acts as a sentinel or flag to indicate when the last structure has been processed In addition to an end-of-list sentinel value, we must provide a special pointer for storing the address of the first structure in the list Introduction to Linked Lists (continued) Introduction to Linked Lists (continued) Introduction to Linked Lists (continued) Introduction to Linked Lists (continued) Dynamic Memory Allocation Dynamic Memory Allocation (continued) The malloc() and calloc() functions can frequently be used interchangeably The advantage of calloc() is that it initializes all newly allocated numeric memory to 0 and character allocated memory to NULL We use malloc() because it is the more general purpose of the two functions malloc(10*sizeof(char)) or calloc(10,sizeof(char)) re