1. Arrays allow storing multiple elements of the same data type sequentially in memory. The size of an array is fixed and elements are accessed via indexes.
2. When asking a user to enter 100 integer values, it is better to store them in a single integer array rather than defining 100 separate variables, as that would be more efficient.
3. In C, arrays are declared by specifying the data type of the elements, the array name, and the number of elements inside square brackets. Individual elements can then be accessed via their index number.
2. Arrays
⢠An array is a type of data structure that stores elements of
same type.
⢠Array size is fixed and cannot be changed.
⢠Elements(data) are sequentially stored in array.
⢠All arrays consist of contiguous memory locations.
⢠The lowest address corresponds to the first element and the
highest address to the last element.
3. Why arrays?
⢠You need to find out the average of 100 integer numbers entered by user.
In C, you have two ways to do this:
1. Define 100 variables with int data type and then perform 100 scanf()
operations to store the entered values in the variables and then at last
calculate the average of them.
2. Have a single integer array to store all the values, loop the array to store
all the entered values in array and later calculate the average.
Which option is better? Justify.
4. Array declaration
To declare an array in C, you need to specify two things.
1. the type of the elements
2. the number of elements in array
type arrayName [ arraySize ];
⢠type can be any valid C data type like int, float, char etc.
⢠arrayName is given according to the variable naming rules in C.
⢠arraySize must be integer greater than zero.
5. Array declaration
⢠Below is the example of declaring marks array of type int with
capacity of storing ten marks.
6. Array initialization
⢠You can initialize an array during declaration.
int mark[5] = {19, 10, 8, 17, 9};
⢠You can also initialize an array like this.
int mark[] = {19, 10, 8, 17, 9};
⢠we haven't specified the size. However, the compiler knows its size is
5 as we are initializing it with 5 elements.
7. ⢠Arrays have 0 as the first index, not 1. In this example, mark[0] is the
first element.
⢠If the size of an array is n, to access the last element, the n-1 index is
used. In this example, mark[4]
⢠Suppose the starting address of mark[0] is 2120d. Then, the address
of the mark[1] will be 2124d. Similarly, the address of mark[2] will be
2128d and so on.
⢠This is because the size of a float is 4 bytes.
