Swap (computer programming)

swap means to exchange the value of two variables. In computer programming, the act of swapping two variables refers to mutually exchanging the values of the variables. Usually, this is done with the data in memory. For example, in a program, two variables may be defined thus (in pseudocode): data_item x := 1 data_item y := 0 swap (x, y); After swap() is performed, x will contain the value 0 and y will contain 1; their values have been exchanged. This operation may be generalized to other types of values, such as strings and aggregated data types. Comparison sorts use swaps to change the positions of data. In many programming languages the swap function is built-in. In C++ overloads are provided allowing std::swap to exchange some large structures in O(1) time. Using a temporary variable The simplest and probably most widely used method to swap two variables is to use a third temporary variable: define swap (x, y) temp := x x := y y := temp While this is conceptually simple and in many cases the only convenient way to swap two variables, it uses extra memory. Although this should not be a problem in most applications, the sizes of the values being swapped may be huge (which means t