Queue and Stack are a structures widely mentioned. However, in C++, for queue you can do it in two ways:
#include <queue>
#include <deque>
but for stack you can only do it like this
#include <stack>
My question is, what's the difference between queue and deque, why two structures proposed? For stack, any other structure could be included?
Moron/Aryabhatta is correct, but a little more detail may be helpful.
Queue and stack are higher level containers than deque, vector, or list. By this, I mean that you can build a queue or stack out of the lower level containers.
For example:
std::stack<int, std::deque<int> > s;
std::queue<double, std::list<double> > q;
Will build a stack of ints using a deque as the underlying container and a queue of doubles using a list as the underlying container.
You can think of s
as a restricted deque and q
as a restricted list.
All that is necessary is that the lower level container implements the methods needed by the higher level container. These are back()
, push_back()
, and pop_back()
for stack and front()
, back()
, push_back()
, and pop_front()
for queue.
See stack and queue for more detail.
With respect to the deque, it is much more than a queue where you can insert at both ends. In particular, it has the random access operator[]
. This makes it more like a vector, but a vector where you can insert and delete at the beginning with push_front()
and pop_front()
.
See deque for detail.