Question

sorry, just following on from the question I had here : here I am trying to run this method to remove a generic value (EltType) from a double sided queue(deque), but I keep getting an error in that, I call insertFirst twice, and insert the value “3” into the array twice, then, when I run removeFirst, it will print out “3” once, and then “Null” thereafter. Would anyone be able to help me out please ?

class ArrayBasedDeque<EltType> {

  private final int CAPACITY = 10;
  private int capacity;
  private int end;
  private EltType deque[];  

  public ArrayBasedDeque() {
    this.capacity = CAPACITY;
    deque = (EltType[]) (new Object[capacity]);  
  } 


 public EltType removeFirst() {
    EltType[] tempArray;
    EltType returned = deque[0];
    tempArray = (EltType[]) new Object[capacity];
      for (int i=1;i<capacity;i++) {
        tempArray[i-1] = deque[i]; 
      }
      deque = tempArray;
    return returned;
  }


  public boolean isEmpty() {
    return end == 0;
  }

  public void insertFirst(EltType first) {
    if(!isEmpty()) {
    EltType[] tempArray;
    tempArray = (EltType[]) new Object[capacity+1];
    for (int i=0;i<deque.length;i++) {
      tempArray[i+1] = deque[i]; 
    }
    deque = tempArray; 
    }
   deque[0] = first;
  }

}

Thank you 🙂

Answer 1

The big glaring issue is that end never changes. isEmpty() will always return true. Now let’s look at your insertFirst() method.

public void insertFirst(EltType first) {
    if(!isEmpty()) {
        EltType[] tempArray;
        tempArray = (EltType[]) new Object[capacity+1];
        for (int i=0;i<deque.length;i++) {
            tempArray[i+1] = deque[i]; 
        }

        deque = tempArray; 
    } 
    deque[0] = first;
}

Knowing that isEmpty() always returns true no matter what, what is the problem with this piece of code?