Chapter 7 Arrays
Welcome to our next chapter, on arrays. In short, arrays are a structure for storing data. You’ve almost surely encountered arrays in your prior math or physics classes. Vectors are a special type array -- vectors are assumed to be elements of an orientable space, in which direction and magnitude are meaningful. Matrices are another example of an array from your previous math courses -- matrices are 2-dimensional arrays (they have both rows and columns), while vectors are 1-dimensional. It is even possible to have arrays which are multidimensional. Such an example are the current RGB values of pixels arranged on your computer monitor. Each pixel has corresponding red, green, and blue values. The result is a 3-dimensional array, which can be visualized as three matrices positioned one behind the other.
Like in mathematics, arrays as a computing object are structures for storing data. Arrays carry the restriction that the data stored within them must all be of the same type. For example, all integer values, all floats, all strings, etc. We’ll spend some time over the next few sections of this book exploring these structures and operations which can be done with them. We’ll leave the technical details about how arrays are stored in memory to your computing courses, instead we will focus on mathematical operations with arrays.
