Reminds me a little bit of a "delta queue" used in efficient discrete time based scheduling, for example, in an OS scheduler. Imagine you want to implement a s

Reminds me a little bit of a "delta queue" used in efficient discrete time based scheduling, for example, in an OS scheduler. Imagine you want to implement a scheduler that accepts jobs and runs them at some point in the future. Instead of keeping a list and scanning through the list at each clock tick, implement a linked list with (time delta, job) at each node. Now, handling a tick() simply requires decrementing the head node and popping items until you see a non-zero delta. Inserting is done like a normal list, except as you iterate through the list, you decrement the desired time interval as you see deltas in the list. It goes like this: insert(job1, 1) # (job1, 1) -> null insert(job2, 1) # (job1, 1) -> (job2, 0) -> null insert(job3, 2) # (job1, 1) -> (job2, 0) -> (job3, 1) -> null tick() -> job1, job2 # (job3, 0) -> null tick -> job3 # -> null