Queue (abstract data type)

In Computer science, a queue is a data structure, used for storing items, before they are processed. Generally, the following operations exist:

• Enqueue: add the item to the back of the queue
• Dequeue: remove the item at the front of the queue
• Optionally, there may be an operation to look at the item at the front of the queue, without removing it.

A queue

Items that are between the first and the last element of the queue are not directly accessible.

There is a specialization, called priority queue: In a priority queue, each item also has a weight, which determine the position of the item in a queue.