ADT, or Abstract Data Type, is like a recipe that tells you what ingredients you need and how to prepare a dish without giving you all the details about each ingredient’s origin or how to grow them.
Think about how you follow a recipe to make a cake. The recipe gives you a list of ingredients and instructions on how to mix and bake them. It doesn’t matter where the flour or eggs come from or how they’re produced; it just tells you how to use them to make the cake.
In a similar way, an Abstract Data Type (ADT) provides a set of operations and the ways to use them without specifying how they’re implemented. For example, imagine a “List” ADT. It tells you that you can add items, remove items, and check if an item is in the list, but it doesn’t explain how these operations are carried out internally.
The purpose of ADTs is to help programmers think about how to use data structures without getting bogged down by the details of how they work. Just like with a recipe, you follow the instructions and use the ingredients in the way specified, without worrying about the underlying details.
In simple terms, an ADT is a way to define how to use data and what you can do with it without getting into the technical details of how the data is managed internally.
