Linked Lists – How Were Linked List Ideas Implemented Before Object-Oriented Paradigm?

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Linked lists, as far as I have seen, are largely implemented using object-oriented ideas. (having an object that holds some information and the address of the next link). How were Linked-lists implemented before the object-oriented paradigm came out? Were they only invented(?) once the OOP was developed?

Best Answer

Linked list have nothing to do with OOP, in fact they predate OOP by quite a bit. Linked list are implemented simply by having a recursive structure, this is in my opinion conceptually easiest to understand in assembly -- you allocate some memory, and the first bytes of that memory serve as a pointer to the next/previous. In assembly you don't have to worry about the "type" and just think of it as another pointer, so the fact that it is recursive is not something you need to think about -- you don't have to think about how something can refer to itself in its definition.