Abstract Data Type and Data Structure
- by mark075
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.