Arrays

Arrays are useful for processing many data or generating many results at once into a compact contiguous structure. Loosely speaking, array structures allow one to manipulate many variables at once. An array is an indexed sequence of components. In mathematics, one is familiar with variables bearing indices like, for example, the vector coordinates x _i or matrix elements m _i,j . In most programming languages, indices start at zero and not at one as is often the case in mathematics. This simple 1-or-0 convention actually yields confusion to many novice programmers, and is therefore an important source of bugs to watch for.