Toward an Understanding of Data Structures

Abstract

This paper presents a notation and formalism for describing the semantics of data structures. This is based on directed graphs with named edges and transformations on these graphs. In addition, and implementation facility is described which could be part of a programming language, which allows a programmer who has expressed the semantics of an algorithm in terms of the graphs to then specify the implementation of some of his data structures in order to gain efficiency. © 1971, ACM. All rights reserved.