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Queue

Data Structure

A queue is an abstract data type representing an ordered collection of elements in which items are added at the rear, enqueue, and removed from the front, dequeue, following first in first out ordering. It is a fundamental structure used in computer programs as well as in transport and operations research modeling for sequential processing. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Disputed
Origin Year
1950
No single origin date is agreed for the queue as a programming data structure. Agner Krarup Erlang's 1909 telephone-traffic work founded the separate mathematical discipline of queueing theory; the queue as an abstract data type in early programming and algorithms literature is usually placed in the 1950s, but sources do not converge on one year, so this date is an approximate placeholder, not an attested one.
Core Principle
The first element added is the first removed, in contrast to a stack's last in first out ordering. 1
Connections

In Field

Source Wikipedia: Queue (Abstract Data Type)
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Queue (Abstract Data Type)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Introduction section, description of main operations
    Enqueue, which adds one element to the rear of the queue
  • Introduction section, on FIFO ordering
    The operations of a queue make it a first-in-first-out (FIFO) data structure as the first element added to the queue is the first one removed.
  • In Field: Algorithms and Complexity Theory
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