How do structures affect efficiency?

Question

Pointers make the program more efficient and faster. But how do structures effect the efficiency of the program? Does it make it faster? Is it for just the readability of the code, or what? And may I have an example of how it does so?

Answer 1

Pointers are just pointing a memory address, they have nothing to do with efficiency and speed(it is just a variable who stores some address which is required/helpful for some instruction to execute, nothing more) Yes but Data structures affect the efficiency of program/code in multiple ways.they can increase/decrease time complexity and space complexity of your algorithm and ultimately your code (in which you are implementing your algo.)

for example, let take example of array and linked list

Array : some amount of space allocated sequentially in memory

Linkedlist : some space allocated randomly in memory but connected via pointers

in all cases both can be used (assuming not much heavy space allocation). but as array is continuous allocation retrieval is faster than random allocation in linked list (every time get address of next allocated block and then fetch the data)

thus this improves speed/efficiency of your code

there are many such examples which will prove you why data sructures are more important (if they were not so important why new algorithms are designed and mostly why you are learning them)

Link to refer, What are the lesser known but useful data structures?