How to Create Linked List in LabVIEW
Linked list is not a standard data type in LabVIEW, but we can create it in LabVIEW with cluster arrays.
First, what is linked list? It is defined as following in wikipedia:
In computer science, a linked list is one of the fundamental data structures, and can be used to implement other data structures. It consists of a sequence of nodes, each containing arbitrary data fields and one or two references (“links”) pointing to the next and/or previous nodes. The principal benefit of a linked list over a conventional array is that the order of the linked items may be different from the order that the data items are stored in memory or on disk, allowing the list of items to be traversed in a different order. A linked list is a self-referential data-type because it contains a pointer or link to another datum of the same type. Linked lists permit insertion and removal of nodes at any point in the list in constant time, but do not allow random access. Several different types of linked list exist: singly-linked lists, doubly-linked lists, and circularly-linked lists.
Linked lists can be implemented in most languages. Languages such as Lisp and Scheme have the data structure built in, along with operations to access the linked list. Procedural or object-oriented languages such as C, C++, and Java typically rely on mutable references to create linked lists.
Here is what we can do to create linked list in LabVIEW: Create a cluster, which has at least one element which is an integer numeric. We can use this element as the link to other list items in the list. Then, create a array which use this cluster as data type. The linked list is created. We can use it as we wish.
