Book Image

Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

By : Mario Eguiluz Alebicto
Book Image

Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

By: Mario Eguiluz Alebicto

Overview of this book

Apple’s Swift language has expressive features that are familiar to those working with modern functional languages, but also provides backward support for Objective-C and Apple’s legacy frameworks. These features are attracting many new developers to start creating applications for OS X and iOS using Swift. Designing an application to scale while processing large amounts of data or provide fast and efficient searching can be complex, especially running on mobile devices with limited memory and bandwidth. Learning about best practices and knowing how to select the best data structure and algorithm in Swift is crucial to the success of your application and will help ensure your application is a success. That’s what this book will teach you. Starting at the beginning, this book will cover the basic data structures and Swift types, and introduce asymptotic analysis. You’ll learn about the standard library collections and bridging between Swift and Objective-C collections. You will see how to implement advanced data structures, sort algorithms, work with trees, advanced searching methods, use graphs, and performance and algorithm efficiency. You’ll also see how to choose the perfect algorithm for your problem.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Swift Data Structure and Algorithms
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Stack


A stack is a Last In First Out (LIFO) data structure. You can think of a LIFO structure resembling a stack of plates; the last plate added to the stack is the first one removed. A stack is similar to an array but provides a more limited, controlled method of access. Unlike an array, which provides random access to individual elements, a stack implements a restrictive interface that tightly controls how elements of a stack are accessed.

Stack data structure

A stack implements the following three methods:

  • push() - Adds an element to the bottom of a stack

  • pop() - Removes and returns an element from the top of a stack

  • peek() - Returns the top element from the stack, but does not remove it

Common implementations can also include helper operations such as the following:

  • count - Returns the number of elements in a stack

  • isEmpty() - Returns true if the stack is empty, and false otherwise

  • isFull() - If a stack limits the number of elements, this method will return true if it is full and false...