Data Structure: What is Array?

Data Structure: What is Array?

An array is a Data Structure comprised of a group of elements (values or variables), each recognized by at least one array index or key. It is a collection of homogeneous items, i.e. it stores data elements having sane data type. It stores elements in contiguous memory locations.

• A particular element can be accessed by an index.
• The area of each element can be computed from its index tuple by a mathematical formula.
• The idea is to store multiple items of the same type together.
• Easier way to calculate the position of each element by simply adding an offset to a base value.

Here element[0] is the first element and element[5] is the last element.

Declaring Array
In C programming we can declare a single dimensional array as follows:

Note- array_size must be a positive integer greater than zero.

Example-

Here rollno is a variable array that can hold 20 integer numbers.

 Initializing Array

As we have specified the array limit as 5 enclosed in [ ], we can only have 5 elements in the array i.e. in { }.
If we keep the [ ] empty, it can hold a large number of elements.

We can also initialize a single element at a time.

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