Quene

here's a huge crowd at your local grocery store. There are too many people trying to buy their respective items and the Shopkeeper doesnt know from where to start. Everyone wants their job done quickly and the shopkeeper needs an efficient method to solve this problem. What does he do? He introduces a Queue System based on the First Come, First Serve System. The Last Person trying to buy an item stands behind the last person at the END of the queue. The
Shopkeeper however is present at the FRONT end of the queue. He gives the item to the person in FRONT of the queue and after the transaction is done, the person in FRONT of the Queue Leaves. Then the person second in queue becomes the First person in the Queue.

Do you get the point here? A Queue is similar to a stack except that addition of data is done in the BACK end and deletion of data is done in the FRONT. Writing a queue is a lot harder than writing a stack. We maintain 2 Integers in
our Queue Data Structure, one signifying the FRONT end of the Queue and the other referring to the BACK end of the Queue.

Let us use the same coding style as we used for the Stack. We first initialise both the ends to -1 to indicate an empty queue. When Data is added to the queue both ends get respective postive values. When New Data is added, the back End is incremented and when data is deleted the front end is decremented. This works fine but it has a major drawback. What if the Maximum capacity of the Queue is 5 Items. Suppose the User has added 4 items, deleted 3 items and adds 2 again. The Stack wont permit him to add the last half of the data as it will report that the stack is full. The Reason is that we are blindly incrementing/decrementing each end depending on addition/deletion not realising that both the ends are related to each other. I leave this as an excercise for you to answer. Why will our proposed Stack report the Stack as Full even though it's actually vacant? So we need another approach.In this method we focus more on the data than on the addition end and the deletion end.

What we now use is the grocery store example again. Suppose there are 5 items in a queue and we want to delete them one by one. We first delete the first data item pointed by the deletion end. Then we shift all data one step ahead so that the second item becomes the first, third item becomes second and so on... Another method would be to maintain the difference between the two ends which is not practical. Hence we stick to our previous method. It might be slow in Big Queues, but it certainly works great. Here's the code.

 

#include<iostream> using namespace std; #define MAX 5 class quene { private: int t[MAX]; int al; int dl; public: quene() { al=-1; dl=-1; } void del() { int temp; if(dl==-1) cout<<"The quene is empty!"<<endl; else { for(int j=0;j<=al;j++) { if((j+1)<=al) { temp=t[j+1]; t[j]=temp; } else { al--; if(al==-1) dl=-1; else dl=0; } } } } void add(int item) { if(dl==-1&&al==-1) { al++; dl++; } else { al++; if(al==MAX) { cout<<"Quene is full!"<<endl; al--; return; } } t[al]=item; } void display() { if(dl!=-1) { for(int iter=0;iter<=dl;iter++) { cout<<t[iter]<<" "; } } else cout<<"Quene is empty!"; } }; int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { quene q; int data[5]={32,23,45,99,24}; cout<<"Quene before adding elements:"; q.display(); cout<<endl<<endl; for(int i=0;i<5;i++) { q.add(data[i]); cout<<"Addition number:"<<(i+1)<<":"; q.display(); cout<<endl; } cout<<"Quene after adding number:"<<endl; q.display(); cout<<endl<<endl; for(int j=0;j<5;j++) { q.del(); cout<<"Deletion number:"<<(j+1)<<endl; q.display(); cout<<endl; } return 0; }

 

OUTPUT:
Queue before adding Elements: EMPTY

Addition Number : 1 : 32
Addition Number : 2 : 32 23
Addition Number : 3 : 32 23 45
Addition Number : 4 : 32 23 45 99
Addition Number : 5 : 32 23 45 99 24

Queue after adding Elements: 32 23 45 99 24

Deletion Number : 1 : 23 45 99 24
Deletion Number : 2 : 45 99 24
Deletion Number : 3 : 99 24
Deletion Number : 4 : 24
Deletion Number : 5 : EMPTY

 

As you can clearly see through the output of this program that addition is always done at the end of the queue while deletion is done from the front end of the queue. Once again the Maximum limit of Data will be extended later when we learn Linked Lists.