Construct · 3 fields · 5 citations
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An abstract data type that holds items in order and releases them first-in, first-out: you enqueue at the back and dequeue from the front. Knuth described it in The Art of Computer Programming (1968) as a linear list where insertion happens at one end and deletion at the other, alongside the stack, whose discipline is last-in, first-out. The referent is a structure inside a running program, and its unit is a position in an ordered list of pending items. What defines it is the discipline, not any wait: an empty queue and a full queue are both well-defined states, and the same abstraction covers message queues that pass work between processes. It shares the word with a line of people but names a rule for ordering, not a crowd.[1]
The mathematical study of waiting lines: how arrivals, service times, and the number of servers determine how long items wait and how long the line grows. Erlang opened the field in 1909 by modelling telephone calls arriving at random to a switchboard, and Kendall (1953) gave it the notation still used, describing a queue by its arrival process, service process, and server count, as in M/M/1. The referent is a stochastic system, and its units are rates: arrivals per hour, services per hour, and the resulting expected wait. It is not a data structure and not a crowd but a probability model of one, and it can describe packets, patients, or shoppers with the same equations while saying nothing about the ordering rule those items happen to follow.[2][3]
A physical line of people waiting for service, held together by a shared norm that position reflects arrival order. Mann (1969) treated the queue as a small social system with its own culture, studying overnight lines for football tickets where people invented roll-calls and penalties to police the order. Larson (1987) added the psychology: what angers people is less the wait itself than seeing it violated, when a latecomer slips ahead. The referent is a group of persons and the norm that governs them, and the unit is a person's place and felt fairness, not a rate or a pointer. It shares the word with the data structure and the theory, but here the object is social justice among strangers, and a first-in-first-out rule is a moral claim people enforce rather than a coded operation.[4][5]
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