| The Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET) programming language is not usually associated
with the study of data structures and algorithms. The primary reason for
this must be because most university and college computer science departments
don’t consider VB.NET to be a “serious” programming language that
can be used to study serious topics. This is primarily a historical bias based
on Basic’s past as a “nonprogrammer’s” language often taught to junior high,
senior high, and liberal arts college students, but not to computer science or
computer engineering majors.
The present state of the language, however, aligns it with other, more serious
programming languages, most specifically Java. VB.NET, in its current form,
contains everything expected in a modern programming language, from true
object-oriented features to the .NET Framework library, which rivals the Java
libraries in both depth and breadth.
Included in the .NET Framework library is a set of collection classes, which
range fromthe Array, ArrayList, and Collection classes, to the Stack and Queue
classes, to the Hashtable and the SortedList classes. Students of data structures
and algorithms can now see how to use a data structure before learning how
to implement it. Previously, an instructor had to discuss the concept of, say, a
stack, abstractly until the complete data structure was constructed. Instructors
can now show students how to use a stack to perform some computations,
such as number base conversions, demonstrating the utility of the data structure
immediately.With this background, students can then go back and learn
the fundamentals of the data structure (or algorithm) and even build their
own implementation. |
