VisuAlgo was conceptualised in 2011 by Associate Professor Steven Halim (NUS School of Computing) as a tool to help his students better understand data structures and algorithms, by allowing them to learn the basics on their own and at their own pace. Together with his students from the National University of Singapore, a series of visualizations were developed and consolidated, from simple sorting algorithms to complex graph data structures. Though specifically designed for the use of NUS students taking various data structure and algorithm classes (CS1010/equivalent, CS2040/equivalent (inclusive of IT5003)), CS3230, CS3233, and CS4234), as advocators of online learning, we hope that curious minds around the world will find these visualizations useful as well.

A natural question that beginners often ask is: Why doesn’t Forth have features that are standard in other languages, for example, arrays? The answer is that Forth is so facile at creating new data types that it is usually easier to invent something that exactly suits your needs than it is to force your program to conform to an arbitrary standard.