An Unordered List A symbol table makes a wonderful data structure example since the pros and cons for the various data structures can be easily explored.
Notice, first of all, that a name is entered once, but may be retrieved many times. In fact, even the enter operation may be preceded by a lookup operation to ascertain that the symbol is not already there. Thus, data structures which search rapidly are to be preferred when efficiency is an issue.
Some data structures make it easier to implement block structure information.
We will consider a number of options:
