Abstract Data Type and Data Structure

Posted by mark075 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by mark075
Published on 2012-05-15T19:11:45Z Indexed on 2012/11/29 5:19 UTC
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It's quite difficult for me to understand these terms. I searched on google and read a little on Wikipedia but I'm still not sure. I've determined so far that:

Abstract Data Type is a definition of new type, describes its properties and operations.

Data Structure is an implementation of ADT. Many ADT can be implemented as the same Data Structure.

If I think right, array as ADT means a collection of elements and as Data Structure, how it's stored in a memory. Stack is ADT with push, pop operations, but can we say about stack data structure if I mean I used stack implemented as an array in my algorithm? And why heap isn't ADT? It can be implemented as tree or an array.

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