Is a queue essentially a linked-list?

I was writing up a simple queue class, and when it came to the copy ctor and the assignment operator, they didn't really differ from how they'd be implemented for a linked list. Is this right?

Is the only difference between a linked-list and a queue the public interface?

I suppose. IOW, you can implement a queue using a linked list, although you don't have to.

There are a variety of ways of implementing a queue. Using a linked-list is one of the most straightforward.
Other ways of storing the data can be thought of as simply optimisations of the linked-list way of doing it.

>Is the only difference between a linked-list and a queue the public interface?
A queue is simply an abstraction. It tells you what operations are supported for a collection of data, and you can implement it however you want as long as you ultimately support those operations.

An example of what prelude says can be seen in this implementation:

Code:

---


const int size = 16;

class queue
{
private:
  int in;
  int out;
  int q[size];
public:
  queue() : in(0), out(0) {}
  void put_back(int x) {
      if (out !=in+1) {
        q[in] = x;
        in++;
      }
    }
    int pop_front() {
      int x = -1;  // Empty returns -1.
      if (out != in)
      {
          x = q[out];
          out++;
      }
      return x;
    }
};

---

--
Mats