Outline

• Discussion and examples about Arrays
  • What is an Array?
  • When and where is an Array used?
  • Complexity
  • Static array usage example
• Dynamic Array implementation details
• Code Implementation

Static Array

• A static array is a fixed length container containing n elements indexable from the range [0, n-1]
  • Indexable: It means that each slot/index in the array can be referenced with a number.
  • A static array is given as a contiguous chunk of memory.

When and Where is a static Array used?

1. Storing and accessing sequential data
2. Temporaily storing objects
3. Used by IO routines as buffers
4. Lookup tables and inverse lookup tables
5. Can be used to return multiple values from a function → Many programming languages only allow a single return value
6. Used in dynamic programming to cache answers to subproblems

Complexity

Complexity of Static/Dynamic Array

• Appending operation to the dynamic array sometimes requries copying all elements to a new larger array, but it happens quite rarely...

Static Array

Static Array Visualization

• Elements in A are referenced by their index
  • There is no other way to access elements in an array
  • Array indexing is zero-based, meaning the first element is found in position zero
• Elements in an array don't need to be unique