List (abstract Data Type) - Implementations

Implementations

Lists are typically implemented either as linked lists (either singly or doubly linked) or as arrays, usually variable length or dynamic arrays.

The standard way of implementing lists, originating with the programming language Lisp, is to have each element of the list contain both its value and a pointer indicating the location of the next element in the list. This results in either a linked list or a tree, depending on whether the list has nested sublists. Some older Lisp implementations (such as the Lisp implementation of the Symbolics 3600) also supported "compressed lists" (using CDR coding) which had a special internal representation (invisible to the user). Lists can be manipulated using iteration or recursion. The former is often preferred in imperative programming languages, while the latter is the norm in functional languages.

Lists can be implemented as self-balancing binary search trees holding index-value pairs, providing equal-time access to any element (e.g. all residing in the fringe, and internal nodes storing the right-most child's index, used to guide the search), taking the time logarithmic in the list's size, but as long as it doesn't change much will provide the illusion of random access and enable swap, prefix and append operations in logarithmic time as well.