title: What are the performance benefits of keeping head node without data in linkedlist?
body: <p>What are the performance benefit of keeping head node with useless data in linkedlist?</p>
  
  <p>I read some implementation of linkedlist operations using head node which keeps only pointer to the first node( data in head node is useless).</p>
  
  <p>But i am unable to figure out even a single benefit of using head node instead of head pointer.</p>
  
  <p>Can someone please clarify with 1 problem and 2 implementations, one with head node and another with head pointer and tradeoff between performance/complexity?</p>