A priority queue is a collection of elements such that each element has been assigned a priority and such that the order in which elements are deleted and processed comes from the following rules:
- An element of higher priority is processed before any element of lower priority.
- two elements with same priority are processed according to the order in which they were added to the queue.
A prototype of a priority queue is time sharing system: programs of high priority are processed first, and programs with the same priority form a standard queue. An efficient implementation for the Priority Queue is to use heap, which in turn can be used for sorting purpose called heap sort.
