This is intended as a summary and supplementary material to the required textbook. One restriction on structure nesting is that a structure cannot contain an image of itself, i.e., it cannot contain a field defined with the same tag as the outside structure. However, a structure may contain a pointer to a structure of the same type as itself. Static data structure is data structure where space is allocated prior to the execution of statements.
Examples are variables and arrays.
Dynamic data structure on the other hand is data structure where space is allocated as the need arises during execution of statements. An example is pointers. A linked list is a collection of records where the order of the components is determined by an explicit link field in each node rather than by the sequential order of the components in memory. An external pointer to a list is a named pointer variable that references a node in a linked list. A singly linked list is a list where each node contains one pointer field that points to the next component in the list.