[ruby-talk:4825] Re: Some questions

> > You mean linked list?  No, but it's easy to define your own list
> >class.
> I was just wondering, of course I can implement one myself. But anyway
> I do not think it makes very much sense if you have the resizable
> Arrays. I was just thinking I have overlooked something.

Linked lists have one speed advantage, it's that you can splice them
(insert,delete) very quickly, provided that you already have a pointer to
the splice point.

However, linked lists are mostly used in functional languages, as constant
objects (values). It's possibly because of the influence of LISP, and also
because of the beautiful recursive definitions you can get out of it. In
LISP, source code is read into nested linked lists before it is executed. 

Finally, linked lists is something lots of students learn in computer
science courses, and then promptly forget when they eventually get to do
"real programming".

matju