What is the underlying data structure for Python lists? - Stack Overflow
What are data structures anyway?
Common data structures that pop up in leetcode style interviews?
List of Data Structures I should know?
It's great that you want to learn more outside of class. Off the top of my head a good starting place is array, linked list, stack, queue, heap, (un)balanced tree, hash map, priority queue. I would suggest trying to implement each of these yourself if possible a good way to ensure that you understand whats going on. The balanced search tree and hash map are particularly useful to understand. AVL, Red-Black, and 2-3 are different varieties of balanced trees. Priority queue can be implemented with a heap, an augmented tree, or a skip list each implementation has its own pros and cons.
Edit: This GitHub page has a pretty extensive compilation of resources on data structures and algorithms. The guy who made it was a self taught developer who created it to prepare for interviews and ended up landing a job at Amazon.
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List objects are implemented as arrays. They are optimized for fast fixed-length operations and incur O(n) memory movement costs for pop(0) and insert(0, v) operations which change both the size and position of the underlying data representation.
See also: http://docs.python.org/library/collections.html#collections.deque
Btw, I find it interesting that the Python tutorial on data structures recommends using pop(0) to simulate a queue but does not mention O(n) or the deque option.
http://docs.python.org/tutorial/datastructures.html#using-lists-as-queues
CPython:
typedef struct {
PyObject_VAR_HEAD
/* Vector of pointers to list elements. list[0] is ob_item[0], etc. */
PyObject **ob_item;
/* ob_item contains space for 'allocated' elements. The number
* currently in use is ob_size.
* Invariants:
* 0 <= ob_size <= allocated
* len(list) == ob_size
* ob_item == NULL implies ob_size == allocated == 0
* list.sort() temporarily sets allocated to -1 to detect mutations.
*
* Items must normally not be NULL, except during construction when
* the list is not yet visible outside the function that builds it.
*/
Py_ssize_t allocated;
} PyListObject;
As can be seen on the following line, the list is declared as an array of pointers to PyObjects.
PyObject **ob_item;