Lecture 21: Circularly linked lists; doubly linked lists
Textbook chapters
3.3-3.4
Circularly linked lists
Suppose I’m a pilot who always flies from Bozeman to Minneapolis to Seattle to Bozeman to Minneapolis…
I want to keep track of my next three flights. If I’m in Bozeman, my next three flights are Minneapolis->Seattle->Bozeman. If I’m in Seattle, they’re Bozeman->-Minneapolis->Seattle.
We want a rotate() method!
Doubly linked lists
We can add some symmetry to our linked lists by making them doubly linked. That is, we change our Nodes to have references to both a next node (next) and a previous node (prev).
We also add sentinels at the beginning and end of our list to make boundary cases easier. This way, we can use the same code to add and remove nodes even when the list is empty.