A queue is a data structure where we insert items from the back and remove items from the front. It follows the principle of First In, First Out data structures. In this article, I’ll walk you through the implementation of queues using Python.
Queues
Queues are data structures in computer science that look like lists in Python where you can insert and delete items. A queue is like stacks where you can insert and delete items in a specific order, but unlike stacks that follow the principle of last-in-first-out data structures, queues follow the principle of last-in-first-out data structures where the first item added is the first item removed.
You can think of Queues data structures as a line of people waiting to buy tickets for a show. Here the first person in line is the first to buy the first ticket and so on. So we can say that the queue data structure in computer science simulates the real queue.
A queue is like arrays where we work with a length that is one greater than the index of the last element in the array. In queues, we use a similar approach. In the section below, I’ll walk you through implementing queues using the Python programming language.
Queues using Python
Below are the functions that a queue data structure provides:
- enqueue: it is used to insert a new item into the Queue.
- dequeue: it is used to remove an item from a queue.
- is_empty: it returns True if the queue is empty and returns false if the queue is not empty.
- size: as the name suggests, it returns the number of items in a queue.
Hope you now understand the concept of queues in computer science. Now, based on the understanding of queue data structures that you got from the concepts and functions mentioned above, let’s see how to implement queues using Python:
So as you can see in the code section above, I have declared all the functions of a queue data structure, now you can easily initialize all these functions one by one to see how the queue data structure works.
Summary
The queue data structure follows the principle of first in first out data structures. It simulates the real-world queue where the first person in the queue gets the first ticket. I hope you liked this article on the concept of queues and their implementation using the Python programming language. Feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.
