In computer science, an array type is a data type that is meant to describe a collection of elements (values or variables), each selected by one or more indices that can be computed at run time by the program. Such a collection is usually called an array variable, array value, or simply array.^[1] By analogy with the mathematical concepts of vector and matrix, an array type with one or two indices is often called a vector type or matrix type, respectively.

Language support for array types may include certain built-in array data types, some syntactic constructions (array type constructors) that the programmer may use to define such types and declare array variables, and special notation for indexing array elements.^[1] For example, in the Pascal programming language, the declaration type MyTable: array [1..4,1..2] of integer, defines a new array data type called MyTable. The declaration var A: MyTable then defines a variable A of that type, which is an aggregate of eight elements, each being an integer variable identified by two indices. In the Pascal program, those elements are denoted A[1,1], A[1,2], A[2,1],… A[4,2].^[2] Special array types are often defined the language's standard libraries.

Array types are distinguished from record types mainly because they allow the element indices to be computed at run time, as in the Pascal assignment A[I,J] := A[N-I,2*J]. Among other things, this feature allows a single iterative statement to process arbitrarily many elements of an array variable.

In more theoretical contexts, especially in type theory and in the description of abstract algorithms, the terms "array" and "array type" sometimes refer to an abstract data type (ADT) also called abstract array or associative array, a mathematical model with the basic operations and behavior of a typical array type in most languages — basically, a collection of elements that are selected by indices computed at run-time.

Depending on the language, array types may overlap (or be identified with) other data types that describe aggregates of values, such as lists and strings. Array types are often implemented by array data structures, but sometimes by other means, such as hash tables, linked lists, or search trees.

Contents 1 History 2 Abstract arrays 3 Implementations 4 Language support 4.1 Multi-dimensional arrays 4.2 Indexing notation 4.3 Index types 4.4 Bounds checking 4.5 Index origin 4.6 Highest index 4.7 Array algebra 4.8 String types and arrays 4.9 Array index range queries 4.10 Slicing 4.11 Resizing 5 See also 5.1 Programming and compiler issues 5.2 Related types 5.3 Language-specific articles 6 References 7 External links

[edit] History

Assembly languages and low-level languages like BCPL^[3] generally have no syntactic support for arrays.

Because of the importance of array structures for efficient computation, the earliest high-level programming languages, including FORTRAN (1957), COBOL (1960), and Algol 60 (1960), provided support for multi-dimensional arrays.

This section requires expansion.

[edit] Abstract arrays

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An array data structure can be mathematically modeled as an abstract data structure (an abstract array) with two operations

get(A, I): the data stored in the element of the array A whose indices are the integer tuple I.

set(A,I,V): the array that results by setting the value of that element to V.

These operations are required to satisfy the axioms^[4]

get(set(A,I, V), I) = V

get(set(A,I, V), J) = get(A, J) if I ≠ J

for any array state A, any value V, and any tuples I, J for which the operations are defined.

The first axiom means that each element behaves like a variable. The second axiom means that elements with distinct indices behave as disjoint variables, so that storing a value in one element does not affect the value of any other element.

These axioms do not place any constraints on the set of valid index tuples I, therefore this abstract model can be used for triangular matrices and other oddly-shaped arrays.

[edit] Implementations

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In order to effectively implement variables of such types as array structures (with indexing done by pointer arithmetic), many languages restrict the indices to integer data types (or other types that can be interpreted as integers, such as bytes and enumerated types), and require that all elements have the same data type and storage size. Most of those languages also restrict each index to a finite interval of integers, that remains fixed throughout the lifetime of the array variable. In some compiled languages, in fact, the index ranges may have to be known at compile time.

On the other hand, some programming languages provide more liberal array types, that allow indexing by arbitrary values, such as floating-pont numbers, strings, objects, references, etc.. Such index values cannot be restricted to an interval, much less a fixed interval. So, these languages usually allow arbtrary new elements to be created at any time. This choice precludes the implementation of array types as array data strcutures. That is, those languages use array-like syntax to implement a more general associative array semantics, and must therefore be implemented by a hash table or some other search data structure.

[edit] Language support

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[edit] Multi-dimensional arrays

The number of indices needed to specify an element is called the dimension, dimensionality, or rank of the array type. (This nomenclature conflicts with the concept of dimension in linear algebra, where it is the number of elements. Thus, an array of numbers with 5 rows and 4 columns (hence 20 elements) is said to have dimension 2 in computing contexts, but 20 in mathematics. Also, the computer science meaning of "rank" is similar to its meaning in tensor algebra but not to the linear algebra concept of rank of a matrix.)

Many languages support only one-dimensional arrays. In those languages, a multi-dimensional array is typically represented by an Iliffe vector, a one-dimensional array of references to arrays of one dimension less. A two-dimensional array, in particular, would be implemented as a vector of pointers to its rows. Thus an element in row i and column j of an array A would be accessed by double indexing (A[i][j] in typical notation). This way of emulating multi-dimensional arrays allows the creation of ragged or jagged arrays, where each row may have a different size — or, in general, where the valid range of each index depends on the values of all preceding indices.

This representation for multi-dimensional arrays is quite prevalent in C and C++ software. However, C and C++ will use a linear indexing formula for multi-dimensional arrays that are declared as such, e.g. by int A[10][20] or int A[m][n], instead of the traditional int **A.^[5]:p.81

[edit] Indexing notation

Most programming languages that support arrays support the store and select operations, and have special syntax for indexing. Early languages used parenthesis, e.g. A(i,j), as in FORTRAN; others choose square brackets, e.g. A[i,j] or A[i][j], as in Algol 60 and Pascal.

[edit] Index types

Array data types are most often implemented as array structures: with the indices restricted to integer (or totally ordered) values, index ranges fixed at array creation time, and multilinear element addressing. This was the case in most "third generation" languages, and is still the case of most systems programming languages such as Ada, C, and C++. In some languages, however, array data types have the semantics of associative arrays, with indices of arbitrary type and dynamic element creation. This is the case in some scripting languages such as Awk and Lua, and of some array types provided by standard C++ libraries.

[edit] Bounds checking

Some languages (like Pascal and Modula) perform bounds checking on every access, raising an exception or aborting the program when any index is out of its valid range. Compilers may allow these checks to be turned off to trade safety for speed. Other languages (like FORTRAN and C) trust the programmer and perform no checks. Good compilers may also analyze the program to determine the range of possible values that the index may have, and this analysis may lead to bounds-checking elimination.

[edit] Index origin

Some languages, such as C, provide only zero-based array types, for which the minimum valid value for any index is 0. This choice is convenient for array implementation and address computations. Other languages provide only one-based array types, where each index starts at 1; this is the traditional convention in mathematics for matrices and mathematical sequences. A few languages, such as Pascal, support n-based array types, whose minimum legal indices are chosen by the programmer. The relative merits of each choice have been the subject of heated debate.^[6]

See comparison of programming languages (array) for the base indices used by various languages.

The 0-based/1-based debate is not limited to just programming languages. For example, the elevator button for the ground-floor of a building is labeled "0" in France and many other countries, but "1" in the USA.

[edit] Highest index

The relation between numbers appearing in an array declaration and the index of that array's last element also varies by language. In many languages (such as C), languages one should specify the number of elements contained in the array; whereas in others (such as Pascal and Visual Basic .NET) one should specify the numeric value of the index of the last element. Needless to say, this distinction is immaterial in languages where the indices start at 1.

[edit] Array algebra

Some programming languages (including APL, Matlab, and newer versions of Fortran) directly support array programming, where operations and functions defined for certain data types are implicitly extended to arrays of elements of those types. Thus one can write A+B to add corresponding elements of two arrays Aand B. The multiplication operation may be merely distributed over corresponding elements of the operands (APL) or may be interpreted as the matrix product of linear algebra (Matlab).

[edit] String types and arrays

Many languages provide a built-in string data type, with specialized notation ("string literals") to build values of that type. In some languages (such as C), a string is just an array of characters, or is handled in much the same way. Other languages, like Pascal, may provide vastly different operations for strings and arrays.

[edit] Array index range queries

Some programming languages provide operations that return the size (number of elements) of a vector, or, more generally, range of each index of an array. In C and C++ arrays. They do not support the size function, so programmers often have to declare separate variable to hold the size, and pass it to procedures as a separate parameter.

Elements of a newly created array may have undefined values (as in C), or may be defined to have a specific "default" value such as 0 or a null pointer (as in Java).

In C++ a vector supports the store, select, and append operations with the performance characteristics discussed above. Vectors can be queried for their size and can be resized. Slower operations like inserting an element in the middle are also supported.

[edit] Slicing

An array slicing operation takes a subset of the elements of an array-typed entity (value or variable) are assembles them as another array-typed entity, possibly with other indices. If array types are implemented as array structures, many useful slicing operations (such as selecting a sub-array, swapping indices, or reversing the direction of the indices) can be performed very efficiently by manipulating the dope vector of the structure. The possible slicings depend on the implementation details: for example, FORTRAN allows slicing off one column of a matrix variable, but not a row, and treat it as a vector; whereas C allow slicing off a row from a matrix, but not a column.

On the other hand, other slicing operations are possible when array types are implemented in other ways.

[edit] Resizing

Some languages allow dynamic arrays(also called resizable, growable, or extensible): array variables whose index ranges may be expanded at any time after creation, without changing the values of its current elements.

For one-dimensional arrays, this facility may be provided as an operation "append(A,x)" that increases the size of the array A by one and then sets the value of the last element to x. Other array types (such as Pascal strings) provide a concatenation operator, which can be used together with slicing to achieve that effect and more. In some languages, assigning a value to an element of an array automatically extends the array, if necessary, to include that element. In other array types, a slice can be replaced by an array of different size" with subsequent elements being renumbered accordingly — as in Python's list assignment "A[5:5] = [10,20,30]", that inserts three new elements (10,20, and 30) before element "A[5]". Resizable arrays are conceptually similar to lists, and the two concept are identified in some languages.

An exensible array can be implemented as a fixed-size array, with a counter that records how many elements are actually in use. The append operation merely increments the counter; until the whole array is used, when the append operation may be defined to fail. This is an implementation of a dynamic array with a fixed capacity, as in the string type of Pascal. Alternatively, the append operation may re-allocate the underlying array with a larger size, and copy the old elements to the new area.

[edit] See also

Look up array in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Data Structures/Arrays

[edit] Programming and compiler issues

• Array slicing
• Array and List comprehension
• Array access analysis by a compiler
• Range check
• Bounds checking and index checking
• Bounds checking elimination
• Delimiter-separated values
• Parallel array
• Off-by-one error

[edit] Related types

• String (computer science)
• Collection class
• Variable-length array
• Dynamic array
• Sparse array

[edit] Language-specific articles

• Comparison of programming languages (array)
• ReDim a Visual Basic function to resize arrays
• Vector (C++)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Array data structure

• NIST's Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures: Array

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