Arrays and Structures: Introduction

Arrays and Structures

Introduction

The variables are used to store data. These variables are the one of the basic building blocks in C++. A single variable is used to store a single value that can be used anywhere in the memory. In some situations, we need to store multiple values of the same type. In that case, it needs multiple variables of the same data type. All the values are stored randomly anywhere in the memory.

For example, to store the roll numbers of the 100 students, it needs 100 variables named as roll1, roll2, roll3,…….roll100 . It becomes very difficult to declare 100 variables and store all the roll numbers. In C++, the concept of Array helps to store multiple values in a single variable. Literally, the meaning of Array is “More than one”. In other words, array is an easy way of storing multiple values of the same type referenced by a common name”. An array is also a derived data type in C++.

“An array is a collection of variables of the same type that are referenced by a common name”. In an array, the values are stored in a fixed number of elements of the same type sequentially in memory. Therefore, an integer array holds a sequence of integers; a character array holds a sequence of characters, and so on. The size of the array is referred to as its dimension.