That first example in the article was interesting because it made me realise that I have a strong aversion to pushing the complexity into the data rather than into the code. Modifying the list seems to me that it could be a cause of other bugs (what if the list is re-used and something depends on it?).
Never mind bugs, imagine that array has 5 million elements. Good luck re-allocating and copying that to add an element at the start and another at the end.
I don't like the approach of pointlessly reallocating the array this way, but 5 million elements is not a problem on any machine built in the last 20 years. That's just 20 megs for 4-byte integers. With modern GC, this is cheap. It's not something you'd want to do in a tight loop (the copy time will start to matter), but for something like the example, the cost (in machine terms) is negligible.
Padding the array is a bit of a code smell. You can't just pad an array without allocating a new block of memory. After allocation you need to copy the array into the new space. This is a significant amount of overhead to a fairly straightforward and efficient algorithm.
This is interesting. Is it possible to implement a linked list while eliminating the end of the list ‘edge case’, in the fashion of the parent article?
