Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in C#

Sorted Lists

The next type of searchable container that we consider is a sorted list . A sorted list is like an ordered list: It is a searchable container that holds a sequence of objects. However, the position of an item in a sorted list is not arbitrary. The items in the sequence appear in order, say, from the smallest to the largest. Of course, for such an ordering to exist, the relation used to sort the items must be a total order.

Program defines the SortedList interface. Like its unsorted counterpart, the SortedList interface extends the SearchableContainer interface defined in Program .

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Program: SortedList interface.

In addition to the basic repertoire of operations supported by all searchable containers, sorted lists provide the following operations:

this[int]: used to access the object at a given position in the sorted list; and
FindPosition: used to find the position of an object in the sorted list.

Sorted lists are very similar to ordered lists. As a result, we can make use of the code for ordered lists when implementing sorted lists. Specifically, we will consider an array-based implementation of sorted lists that is derived from the OrderedListAsArray class defined in Section , and a linked-list implementation of sorted lists that is derived from the OrderedListAsLinkedList class given in Section .