Question

I am trying to learn about data structures and algorithms on my own. I wrote my own double-linked list in C and now I want to write some algorithms to perform on the list. What is the preferred way to swap list items? Is it better to swap the content or to rearrange the pointers which point to the next and previous list item?

Answer 1

Rearrange the pointers. Swapping the data items can have side effects. In particular, you may have stored a reference to a node somewhere outside of the function, and usually when you rearrange the order of nodes in a list, you don’t want people holding a reference to a node to suddenly find that the node points to new data. That’s because generally the important, identifying characteristic of a node is the data it points to not its position in the list.