Arrays

By
Dr.A.Ashok Kumar
Deparment of Computer Science
Alagappa Government Arts College, Karaikudi
 Introduction
 An array refers to a collection of homogeneous
elements, stored in contiguous locations in
memory
 The basic operations on arrays:
• Extraction and
• Storing
 Array is an example of static allocation of
memory
 Continued...
 A variable of primitive type refer a single
entity
 Arrays are data structures used to refer a
collection of similar data types

“An array is defined as a finite ordered

collection of homogeneous elements stored in
contiguous location”
 Continued...
 Each term describes the feature of an array:
• A finite collection refers to the size of the array – the
size of the collection is fixed
• The elements of the array are of same type
• Arrays are ordered collection
• Each element stored adjacent to each other – a block of
memory allocated at one time
• All elements of an array are referred by a common
name
 Contunied..
Array Name
 Storage A

representation of an 1010
B
1010
array 1010
C

1010 D

T
 Range of an Array
 Individual elements of an array are referred with
the index
 Index gives the relative position of the element
(offset) from the starting position of the array
 The first index is referred as the lower bound
 The last index is referred as the upper bound
 Range refers to the number of elements in the
array
 The lower bound depends on programming
languages
 Continued..
 Few examples of array declaarations in C:
• Int data[10]
 Lower bound 0, upperbound 9, range 10
• Char code[20]
 Lower bound 0, upper bound 19, range 20
 In general, if the lower bound is 0 and range is n
then the upper bound will be n-1
 The physical size of the array is:
the number of elements * number of bytes
required to store the element
 Primitive operations
 The primitive operations on an array are
• Extraction(retrieval)
• Storing
 Extraction refers to getting the value of an
element stored in an array
X = Data[i] , where i is the valid index in the
array
 Storing value is opposite to retrieval
Data[i] = X
 Addressing Function
 A function that gives the starting byte address
of an element, if the base address and index of
the element are given
 Addressing functions give a mapping between
logical numbering of the elements and the
physical byte address
 Addressing function depends on the type of the
arrays
 One-dimensional array
 It refers to a collection of elements in one
dimension

str

A B C D E F G H I J

10 elements

Char str[10];
 Continued...
 If base address of str be b
• Then the first element stored in this address
• Second element stored in b+2
• Third element stored in b+2*2
 We assume elements are stored from 0th index
 In general
• The address of the ith element is b+i*e
 b is the base address
 i is the index of the element
 e is the size of the data type
 This is the addressing function of one-dimensional
array
 Two-dimensional array
 Represented by rows and columns
 Individual elements denoted by row index and
column index values
 Two-dimensional matrix id declared as
A[lb1...ub1] [lb2...ub2]
 lb1 and lb2, lower bound for rows and columns
 ub1 and ub2, upper bound for rows and columns
 The range of 2-dimensional array is (ub1-lb1+1)
(ub2-lb2+1)
 Storage representation of 2D arrays
 2D arrays are logical representation
 The storage is single dimension
 So need a mapping between 2D representation
and single dimension
 This mapping is a way of storing the elements
of 2D array into an one-dimensional array
 Two ways of storage representations:
1. Row major order representation
2. Column major order representation
 Row major order representation
 The elements are stored in row wise
 The elements of 0th row are stored first and then
first row and so on
Address Values
1 2 3 4 5 b 1
b+1 2
6 7 8 9 10 b+2 3
b+3 4
11 12 13 14 15
b+4 5
b+5 6
b+6 7
b+7 8
b+8 9
b+9 10
b+10 11
b+11 12
b+12 13
b+13 14
b+14 15
 Continued...
 The addressing function is:
Address of a[i][j] = b+[(i*COL)+j]*e
• b is base address
• i number of elements in each row
• COL number of columns
• j is the number of elements in the ith row and column
preceding j
• e is size of each element
 Column major order representation
 The elements are stored in column wise
 The elements in 0th column are stored first, then 1st column and
so on
Address Values
1 2 3 4 5 b 1
b+1 6
6 7 8 9 10 b+2 11
b+3 2
11 12 13 14 15 b+4 7
b+5 12
b+6 3
b+7 8
b+8 13
b+9 4
b+10 9
b+11 14
b+12 5
b+13 10
b+14 15
 Continued...
 The addressing function is
Address of a[i][j] = b+[(j*ROW)+i)*e
• b is base address
• j Index of jth column
• ROW number of rows in the table
• i index of ith row
• e is the size of each column
 Special types of matrices
 The special types of matrices classified based
on the characteristic position of non zero
elements
• Lower triangular matrices
• Upper triangular matrices
• Tridiagonal Matrices
• Sparse matrices
 Lower triangular Matrices
 A square matrix is called lower triangular if
all the entries above the main diagonal are zero
1 0 0 0
2 3 0 0
4 5 6 0
7 8 9 10
 In a n*n lower triangular matrix, the number of
non-zero elements is
1+2+3+...+n = n(n+1)/2
 Continued...
 In a lower triangular matrix,
0 If i>j
A[i][ j ]  
non  zero otherwise

 If the matrix A(n*n) is represented as

B[n(n+1)/2) matrix
 The storage representation of the matrix A is

B[i(i  1) / 2  j If i≤j
A[i][ j ]  
0 otherwise
 Upper triangular matrix
 A square matrix is called upper triangular if
all the entries below the main diagonal are zero
1 2 3 4
0 5 6 7
0 0 8 9
0 0 0 10
 In a n*n lower triangular matrix, the number of
non-zero elements is
n+(n-1)+(n-2)+....+2+1=n(n+1)/2
 Continued ...
 In an upper triangular matrix
0 If i<j
A[i][ j ]  
non  zero otherwise

 If the matrix A(n*n) is represented as

B[n(n+1)/2) matrix
 The storage representation of the matrix A is

B[i(i  1) / 2  j If i≥j
A[i][ j ]  
0 otherwise
 Tridiagonal Matrix
 A tridiagonal matrix has elements only on the
main diagonal, the first superdiagonal, and the
first subdiagonal
x x 0 0
x x x 0
0 x x x
0 0 x x

 The total number of non-zero elements = 3n-2

 Continued...
 Addressing function of the tridiagonal
elements is

A[i][j] = B[2*i+j]
 Sparse matrix
 Sparse matrices in which the number of non-zero
elements is less compared to zero elements
 The non-zero elements will be in random positions
 Each element of a sparse matrix is represented by a
triple as (row,col,value)

4 0 0 0 row col value

0 0 0 2 0 0 4
1 3 2
0 0 3 0
2 2 3
6 0 0 0
3 0 6