Links of a Linked List

A symbolic address such as elmnt02 is a symbol in a source program that stands for an address. The above program fragment corresponds to this picture:

The two nodes are not necessarily next to each other in memory. The following fragment implements the entire five node linked list:

          .data
elmnt01:  .word  1
          .word  elmnt02

elmnt02:  .word  2
          .word  elmnt03

elmnt03:  .word  3
          .word  elmnt04

elmnt04:  .word  5
          .word  elmnt05

elmnt05:  .word  7
          .word  0

Each node contains the address of its successor node. The field that holds this address is called the next field or (to avoid ambiguity) the link field. There is no need to provide a label for this field in the nodes.

In a practical program you would never implement a linked list by explicitly coding it this way. And usually there is more data per node than a single integer. But for now let us keep it simple.