The Need for Efficiency

The operations supported by the most commonly used data structures are not hard to implement correctly. We can store the data in an array or a linked list. Each operation can be implemented by iterating over all the elements of the array or list and possibly adding or removing an element.

This kind of implementation is easy but not very efficient. Does this really matter? Computers are becoming faster and faster. Maybe the obvious implementation is good enough. Let’s do some rough calculations to find out.