Overview of One Dimensional Array

Array: A data structure which stores homogenous data types in continuous memory allocation is known as an Array. It stored several related items using a single name. Different elements can be accessed using the index.

Consider a cupboard in your local library. It has different sections for different genres of book. Each section can accommodate a specific number of books.
Now consider the section of Mathematics wherein one would only find books on mathematics. 
From the above figure, we can derive the following analogy with Array:
Mathematics genre - data type
width of a book- size of data type
size of section- the size of the array
colour of a book- data
The index of memory starts at 0.
While using C and C++ programming languages, the size of the array is fixed.
The size of the array in Python, Java, Kotlin, JavaScript and PHP is not fixed.


Applications of Array:

  • To maintain a list of data. For example: To search if a person has registered in a list of registered names.
  • Sort the numbers to find the median.
  • Use for CPU scheduling.
  • Use to implement abstract data structures like stacks and queues.

Advantages of a single-dimensional array:

  • Convenient searching and sorting of elements.
  • Makes code reusable.
  • Use lesser memory then linked list, tree, graph etc.

Disadvantages of a single-dimensional array:

  •  The programmer has to guess the required size. Large size leads to wastage of memory space. Less size than required leads to problems in execution.

  • Difficult Insertion and deletion. Shifting of elements requires additional computation during the stated operations.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Overview of Tree Data Structure

Overview of Three Dimensional Array

Overview of 2 Dimensional array