Arrays

Arrays and Memory Representation

Arrays are a fundamental data structure in computer science, used
to store and manipulate large collections of data. In this chapter,
we learn how arrays are represented in memory and how we can
use this knowledge to optimize our code.

Memory Representation

In order to understand how arrays are stored in memory, we first
need to understand how memory works. Memory is a large
collection of bytes, each with its own unique address. When we
declare a variable, the operating system assigns it a block of
memory and stores its address in a register.

For example, let's say we declare an integer variable x and assign
it the value 5:

int x = 5;
The operating system might assign x the memory
address 0x1000 , and store the value 5 at that address.

Arrays

An array is a collection of variables of the same type, stored in
contiguous blocks of memory. This means that if we declare an
array of integers int arr[10] , the operating system will assign
it a block of memory big enough to store 10 integers, and each
integer will be stored in a contiguous block of memory.

For example, let's say we declare an array of integers int
arr[10] and initialize it with the values {1, 2, 3, 4, 5,