What is an Array?
This lesson briefly defines arrays, their types, and the difference between one-dimensional and two-dimensional arrays. It also goes over how arrays are stored in memory
In this lesson, you will revise the basic concepts of arrays and go through some practical examples to understand this simple yet powerful data structure.
Introduction
An array is a collection of items of the same type stored contiguously in memory. It is the simplest and most widely used data structure. Most of the other data structures like stack and queues can be implemented using the array structure. This makes the array one of the central building blocks of all data structures.
Look at the figure below; you have made a simple array with four elements. Each item in the collection is called a data element, and the number of data elements stored in an array is known as its size.
C# has two kinds of types: reference types and value types. Reference type variables store references to their data (objects), and value type variables directly contain their data. All C# arrays are of reference type.
Declaring arrays
A generic definition of a one-dimensional array is given below:
datatype [] arrayName;
For example:
int[] array1 = new int[10];
This declares array1 as an array of 10 integers.
Initializing arrays
Arrays can be assigned values when they are declared. This is called array initialization. An example of array ...