Specification Using Maps

Abstract

When handling sets of records, we have, up to now, been stringing them together in a form of linked list. This is a perfectly efficient representation for those situations when we wish to scan an entire set of records to derive some specified information. However, it is not very efficient when we only require one, or a small subset of the total set of records. An alternative way of holding sets of records would be to store them in an array and access individual records directly by their position in the array (See figure 7.1).