Data Structure and Algorithm

  DATA STRUCTURE

A data structure is a class of data that can be characterized by its organization and the operations that are defined on it. These are sometimes called data types.

(Or)

 It can also be defined as the way of organizing data both mathematically and logically.

(Or)

Data structure is a collection of data elements organized in a specified manner and accessing functions are defined to store and retrieve individual elements.

ALGORITHM

Algorithm is a method of representing the step-by-step logical procedure for solving a problem. An algorithm is a recipe for finding right answer to a problem or to a difficult problem by breaking down the problem into simple cases. According to D.E. Knuth, a pioneer in the computer science discipline.

• Finiteness:  an algorithm must terminate in a finite number of steps.
• Definiteness:  each step of the algorithm must be precisely and unambiguously stated.
• Effectiveness:  each step must be effective, in the sense that it should be primitive and can be performed exactly in finite amount of time.
• Generality: the algorithm must be complete in itself so that it can used to solve all problem of a specific type for any input data.
• Input / Output:  each algorithm must take zero, one or more quantities as input data and produce one or more output values.