Session T1G TEACHING DATA STRUCTURES: THREAD SAFETY AND COMPONENTS
Benjamin Price Shuits · 2002
The data structures that are written in a typical Data Structures course cannot or would not be used in com- mon applications in industry for two reasons. First, they do not work according to their specifications ifthey are used in a multi-threaded environment. lfio threads are deleting ad- jacent elements of a linkd list at the same time, for example, then one of the deletes may not have any effect. Second, they do notjire change events and thus frustrate common design practices ojconnecting sofiare components. As a result, it is more diJficult for the application programmer to seporate the data, the structures, the logic, the user interface. and the application code from each other. Here we discuss some is- sues involved in including these two topics, threads and rom- ponents, in a course on data structures. Students who learn these techniques will have less to learn when they begin to use and write data structures in industry.