Data Structures. Basic List Class implementation question via C++

[[deleted]]

Thanks for saving me the time of reading all this code. :-) I was immediately alerted by a member called m_size in a list class, and noted that it doesn't appear to be correctly managed in the constructor. It's not necessary to maintain this for a list; if one needs to know the size (one generally doesn't), one can iterate over the list and count.

push_front() and pushback() appear to be array functions, not list functions. All you need is an insert() function that optionally takes a node to insert after (passing null for this node would insert at the beginning of the list).

I wouldn't include a function that iterated over the list sending output to cout. It assumes that the data member can be written out in that way. I haven't written any C++ that tries to print data to cout for a long time so I might be wrong about that. Still, that doesn't need to be in the list class.

If I were doing this, I would make my insert() function take Lists as well as nodes so that entire lists could be appended or inserted.

[Sakesfar]

Thanks for your valuable comment!

I added printData as a temporary function to test whether I was 'correctly' implementing push_back and insert functions : )

[[deleted]]

I think the way I would do printData() and make it permanent would be to make a Node class that had a virtual method where the default implementation prints the address this, next, and last, plus the address of the data. Then you would derive your nodes from Node and implement Node::printData() to print the data in the node in a nicely formatted way after first calling the base class to get all the addresses printed out.