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Exploring Python built-in data types

In any language, data structures are used to store and manipulate complex data. In Python, data structures are storage containers for managing, organizing, and searching data in an efficient way. They are used to store a group of data elements called collections that need to be stored and processed together. In Python, the important data structures that can be used to store collections are summarized in Table 2.1:

...

Data Structure	Brief Explanation	Example
List	An ordered, possibly nested, mutable sequence of elements	["John", 33,"Toronto", True]
Tuple	An ordered immutable sequence of elements

Exploring abstract data types

Abstract data types (ADTs) are high-level abstractions whose behavior is defined by a set of variables and a set of related operations. ADTs define the implementation guidance of “what” needs to be expected but give the programmer freedom in “how” it will be exactly implemented. Examples are vectors, queues, and stacks. This means that two different programmers can take two different approaches to implementing an ADT, like a stack. By hiding the implementation level details and giving the user a generic, implementation-independent data structure, the use of ADTs creates algorithms that result in simpler and cleaner code. ADTs can be implemented in any programming language, such as C++, Java, and Scala. In this section, we shall implement ADTs using Python. Let’s start with vectors first.

Vector

A vector is a single-dimension structure for storing data. They are one of the most popular data structures in Python...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed data structures that can be used to implement various types of algorithms. After going through this chapter, you should now be able to select the right data structure to be used to store and process data with an algorithm. You should also be able to understand the implications of our choice on the performance of the algorithm.

The next chapter is about sorting and searching algorithms, in which we will use some of the data structures presented in this chapter in the implementation of the algorithms.

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