Introduction:

In computer science, an array data structure, or simply an array, is a data structure consisting of a collection of elements (values or variables), each identified by at least one array index or key. An array is stored such that the position of each element can be computed from its index tuple by a mathematical formula. The simplest type of data structure is a linear array, also called one-dimensional array. For example, an array of 10 32-bit (4-byte) integer variables, with indices 0 through 9, may be stored as 10 words at memory addresses 2000, 2004, 2008, ..., 2036, (in hexadecimal: 0x7D0, 0x7D4, 0x7D8, ..., 0x7F4) so that the element with index i has the address 2000 + (i × 4).[4]The memory address of the first element of an array is called first address, foundation address, or base address. Because the mathematical concept of a matrix can be represented as a two-dimensional grid, two-dimensional arrays are also sometimes called matrices. In some cases the term "vector" is used in computing to refer to an array, although tuples rather than vectors are the more mathematically correct equivalent. Tables are often implemented in the form of arrays, especially lookup tables; the word table is sometimes used as a synonym of array.

History:

The first digital computers used machine-language programming to set up and access array structures for data tables, vector and matrix computations, and for many other purposes. John von Neumann wrote the first array-sorting program (merge sort) in 1945, during the building of the first stored-program computer.p. 159 Array indexing was originally done by self-modifying code, and later using index registers and indirect addressing. Some mainframes designed in the 1960s, such as the Burroughs B5000 and its successors, used memory segmentation to perform index-bounds checking in hardware. Assembly languages generally have no special support for arrays, other than what the machine itself provides. The earliest high-level programming languages, including FORTRAN (1957), Lisp (1958), COBOL (1960), and ALGOL 60 (1960), had support for multi-dimensional arrays, and so has C (1972). In C++ (1983), class templates exist for multi-dimensional arrays whose dimension is fixed at runtime as well as for runtime-flexible arrays.

Application:

Arrays are used to implement mathematical vectors and matrices, as well as other kinds of rectangular tables. Many databases, small and large, consist of (or include) one-dimensional arrays whose elements are records. Arrays are used to implement other data structures, such as lists, heaps, hash tables, deques, queues, stacks, strings, and VLists . Array-based implementations of other data structures are frequently simple and space-efficient (implicit data structures), requiring little space overhead, but may have poor space complexity, particularly when modified, compared to tree-based data structures (compare a sorted array to a search tree).

One Dimenstional Arrays:

A one-dimensional array (or single dimension array) is a type of linear array. Accessing its elements involves a single subscript which can either represent a row or column index.As an example consider the C declaration int anArrayName[10]; which declares a one-dimensional array of ten integers. Here, the array can store ten elements of type int . This array has indices starting from zero through nine. For example, the expressions anArrayName[0] and anArrayName[9] are the first and last elements respectively.For a vector with linear addressing, the element with index i is located at the address B + c × i, where B is a fixed base address and c a fixed constant, sometimes called the address increment or stride.

Multidimenstional Arrays:

For a multidimensional array, the element with indices i,j would have address B + c · i + d · j, where the coefficients c and d are the row and column address increments, respectively.More generally, in a k-dimensional array, the address of an element with indices i₁, i₂, ..., i_k is