What are data structures?

A data structure is a way of storing and unifying data in such a way that operations on that data can be performed in an efficient manner. The data can be stored in several ways. For example, we can have a Person object that contains a few properties, such as PersonID and PersonName, where PersonID is of the integer type and PersonName is of the string type. This Person object stores the data in memory, and can be further used to save that record in the database. Another example is an array called Countries of the string type that contains a list of countries. We can use the Countries array to retrieve a country name and use it in a program. Therefore, any type of object that stores data is called a data structure. All primitive types, such as integers, strings, chars, and Booleans, are different types of data structure, whereas other collection types...