On a New Method of Storing a Variable Size Array

There are several known ways of storing stack data structure – as a linked list (called list from now on in this paper), an array which size is dynamically increased on demand (called vector), or a doubleended queue (called deque). C++ Standard [1] suggests a deque as a standard container to use as a back-end for a stack's internal storage. C++ deque implementations should rely on memory paging for a better use of processor's caching mechanism [2] (though on practice this advice is not always followed). This paper introduces a new data structure, log_vector, with the following properties: • constant time random access to individual elements; • constant time element addition to the end; • constant time element removal from the end; • constant time empty data structure creation; • amortized constant space per individual elements; • constant additional space used; In theory it outperforms vector in the element addition and removal, behaves similarly to deque on all comparison parameters listed here, and has better random access time than list. It will be shown that on practice it behaves better than list, deque and vector when used as a stack with indexed access to its elements.