Available under Creative Commons-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/402b20ad-c01f-45f1-9743-05eadb1f710e@37.6
- Arrays...
- are contiguous (in memory) sets of object references (or values, for primitives),
- are objects,
- are dynamically created (via new), and
- may be assigned to variables of type Object or primitives
- An array object contains zero or more unnamed variables of the same type. These variables are commonly called the elements of the array.
- A non-negative integer is used to name each element. For example, arrayOfInts[i] refers to the i+1st element in the arrayOfInts array. In computer-ese, an array is said to be a "random access" container, because you can directly (and I suppose, randomly) access any element in the array.
- An array has a limited amount of intelligence, for instance, it does know its maximum length at all times, e.g. arrayOfInts.length.
- Arrays have the advantage that they
- provide random access to any element
- are fast
- require minimum amounts of memory
More information on arrays can be found in the Java Resources web site page on arrays.
Note: Arrays are size and speed at a price.
- 1577 reads
