If you would just leave the node class like that, it would function like a type of graph where the connections are in one direction and no more is aware of the nodes that point to it.
Thank for you the comment!
That's an interesting observation about the graph. But there's one thing about that I don't understand. Wouldn't the code still need some mechanism to keep track of the first node? It seem to me that, without a pointer to the first node, that node would get lost and none of the other nodes could be accessed.
From what I've learned, it seems sensible to make that pointer to the first node be part of another class, perhaps a class called Graph. Is there another approach I could consider?
In this case, whatever the calling code was would need to save the head pointer in the calling function and pass it around. This isn't exactly an antipattern as we do need to pass around both a string and its length in some languages like C, but it obviously isn't preferable.
If you would just leave the node class like that, it would function like a type of graph where the connections are in one direction and no more is aware of the nodes that point to it.
Thank for you the comment!
That's an interesting observation about the graph. But there's one thing about that I don't understand. Wouldn't the code still need some mechanism to keep track of the first node? It seem to me that, without a pointer to the first node, that node would get lost and none of the other nodes could be accessed.
From what I've learned, it seems sensible to make that pointer to the first node be part of another class, perhaps a class called Graph. Is there another approach I could consider?
In this case, whatever the calling code was would need to save the head pointer in the calling function and pass it around. This isn't exactly an antipattern as we do need to pass around both a string and its length in some languages like C, but it obviously isn't preferable.
Thanks for explaining that for me.