Lesson 6 - Linked lists in the C language

In the previous lesson, Dynamic arrays (vectors) in the C language, we created a dynamic array (vector). That is the first data structure in which we can store elements without having to specify its size first. As we mentioned, the advantage of the vector is a random access to its elements. And its disadvantage is the impossibility of inserting elements in the middle of the vector, as well as (even though it's not significant) memory and time demands associated with maintaining the free space in the array for additional elements.

In today's C tutorial, we're going to create a so-called linked list. It's a data structure that's used to store elements whose number we usually don't know in advance. We won't use an array in this case at all. The individual elements of the linked list are stored randomly in memory (they are no longer behind each other) and the consecutive elements point to each other. We can imagine this as a chain, when the 1st element points to the second, the second to the third, and so on.

Let's see how several numbers stored in an array look like:

When we put the same elements in a linked list, we can imagine the situation in the memory like this:

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