Introduction to Abstract Data Types

By Nischal Lal Shrestha | On Tue, Sep 17 2019 | Filed under Algorithm

Introduction to Abstract Data Types

Computer Scientists uses the concept of abstraction to manage the complexity of a system or a problem. By abstraction we mean, specifying what it does, but not How it does. Applying the same concept of abstraction on the design of data structures give rise to abstract data types or ADTs.

Abstract Data Type(ADT) is a mathematical model of a data structures that specify:

types of data stored
operations allowed on them
types of parameters of operation.

Using ADT we are concerned only with what the data is representing and not with how the data will be constructed. Here, we are hiding the details of implementation from user's view(Information Hiding).

Advantages of using ADTs:

Separates the logical and physical perspectives of data.
Allows better modeling of real-world problems.
Enhance the robustness of the system.
Since ADTs clusters the operations and the representation of attributes, it captures the semantics of the type very well.