Comment by worthless-trash
3 years ago
Queue can clearly mean "work that needs to be completed" not necessarily 'work completed in order'. Your definition is much stricter than it needs to be for most use cases.
3 years ago
Queue can clearly mean "work that needs to be completed" not necessarily 'work completed in order'. Your definition is much stricter than it needs to be for most use cases.
There is clearly a conceptual difference between a set of things from which you pull things out randomly, and a queue. A queue always has intrinsic criteria to select the next item to be pulled out.
There are many times when the start order doesn’t really matter, and the additional sorting overhead isn’t worth it. In those cases people will still tend to refer to the entity holding the jobs to be processed as a queue despite the fact that it doesn’t strictly follow FIFO order.
If they are being technically precise, queue isn’t the correct term, but language changes with context and time. Either way the implementation isn’t wrong if strict start order has been considered and isn’t important.
you're confusing between "i don't care about order", and "there is no order". Name ONE queue implementation that doesn't have order.
4 replies →
From the dictionary.
Queue: a list of data items, commands, etc., stored so as to be retrievable in a definite order, usually the order of insertion.
note the term "Usually", not "always".
> to be retrievable in a definite order, usually the order of insertion.
always has an oder, which is usually of insertion.
not necessarily 'work completed in order'
That's exactly what a queue means, not just in every day life, but specifically in computer science.
This depends if we consider a priority queue to be a type of queue.
No it doesn't. A queue always has an order. A priority queue just means you aren't always inserting at the last place in the queue.