I’m planning to do a small program that’ll display a graph which will be updated a few times per second (maybe 100/200ms or so). The purpose is to plot over 1000 different values in the graph, somewhat like an XY plot.
When the array contains 1000 elements, I’d like to add a new element at the end, and in the process pushing all the other elements one step back. In essence, element 999 would become 998, and 998 would become 997… all the way to the first element, which would simply be thrown away. Does anyone have an example or a good algorithm for doing this, either with regular arrays, Vector, LinkedList or any other method?
My first thought would be to create a new array and copy the elements that I want to keep into the new one, throwing away say the first 100 elements. At this point, I’d add the new 100 elements at the end of the array, and keep repeating this process, but surely there must be a better way of doing this?
What you are asking about is called deque in the algorithmic world, i.e. double ended vector.
That is the class you will need.
Basically deque supports adding and removing elements from both the beginning and the end of the sequence.
EDIT Actually as I read through the documentation I was surprised to see that the sdk implementation of deque does not support direct indexing (I am used to using this structure in C++). So I kept on searching and found this answer, linking to this library, which might be of help for you.