What is Abstract Data Type anyway?

Object-Oriented Programming contains other concepts to be designed. One of them is 'Abstract Data Type'. Frankly speaking, I am still not confident to define the definition of Abstract Data Type(ADT). According to the lecture, we abstract data and operations, and suppress the implementation. For example, sequences items that can me added, removed, accessed, specialized list with access to only recently added item, collection of items accessed by associated keys.

Further research provided me better understanding of ADTs.

Basically, ADT is a mathematical model for data types where is defined by its behaviour from the point of view of a user of the data. Integers can be ADT, so can queue, list. Data structures such as queue, dequeue, list, tree, graph, set, which I already learned are included in ADT.

Abstract Data Type

   The picture above shows how ADT can be defined. The video I found on Youtube summarizes and explains well on this subject and it was great help for me to understand.

If anyone interested , watch this video, hope it will help you organize your thought as it did to me. Also, this is the link of the page that contains the above picture. It is a part of free online book called 'Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures using Python' by Brad Miller, David Ranum. This book also talks about basic data structures, sorting, searching, tree which we have learned in the class. I think it could be a good reading for further reference.

http://interactivepython.org/courselib/static/pythonds/Introduction/WhyStudyDataStructuresandAbstractDataTypes.html

In ADT, there are different data structures. Each data structures itself has many things to talk about. My goal from now is, reading about more ADT and study each data structures in ADT.