Are there advantages of implementing a singly instead of a doubly linked list other than space?
Using singly linked list instead of a doubly linked list?
data structures;linked lists
Other than saving space, the first advantage I can see for singlylinked lists over doubly linked lists is to avoid having to update twolinks instead of one when you modify the list, when adding an elementfor example.Of course, one might say that you can always ignore the second link,but in that case, it is no longer doubly linked, but only an unusedfield.What might also be seen as an advantage is that singly linked list arenecessarily consistent, though possibly wrong when there are bugs inthe program.  Doubly linked lists can end-up having inconsistent linksforward and backward. But it is debatable which of the two cases, ifany, is an advantage.update:I had tried to see some impact on garbage collection, but foundnone. Actually, there is one when storage reclamation is done byreference counting, as reference counting is defeated by loops, anddoubly linked lists contain loops. Singly linked list escape theproblem. Of course, there are ways around it for doubly linked lists,such as the use of weak pointers, or programmable reference countingas part of data abstraction.