Implementation of a Queue in C
We can implement a queue in C using either an array or a linked list. In this article, we will use the array data structure to store the elements. The insertion in the queue is done at the back of the queue and the deletion is done at the front. So we maintain two index pointers front and rear pointers to keep track of the front and back of the queue. The queue consists of two basic operations enqueue which adds elements to the queue (insertion) from the rear pointer and dequeue(deletion) which removes elements from the queue through the front pointer.
Representation of Stack in C
In C, the queue can be represented as the structure that contains one array of fixed size, index pointer to the front, and index pointer to the end.
struct Queue {
type arr[MAX_SIZE];
int back;
int front;
}
The front pointer initial value will be -1 and the back pointer initial value will be 0. The front pointer will always point to one element before the element that is to be dequeue while the back pointer will point to the next empty element after the element that is just dequeued.
Queue in C
A queue is a linear data structure that follows the First In First Out (FIFO) order of insertion and deletion. It means that the element that is inserted first will be the first one to be removed and the element that is inserted last will be removed at last.
In this article, we’ll learn how to implement the queue data structure in the C programming language. We will also look at some of its basic operations along with their time and space complexity analysis.