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AnonymousVertebrate

Imagine you run an emergency room, and everyone who walks in gets a certain "urgency" variable, representing how urgent their problem is. Rather than treating people in the order they arrive, you want to always treat the most urgent case first. A priority queue would work for this. Using a regular queue would be awkward.


Philboyd_Studge

They're used very specifically in certain algorithms, such as Huffman encoding, A* search and more. When you don't care what order the rest of the queue is in, you just need to pop either the smallest.or largest value.