Arrays Introduction

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Lesson outline

What are Arrays?

Arrays are fundamental data structures in C++ that store multiple values of the same type in contiguous memory locations.

Key characteristics:

Fixed size for built-in (C-style) arrays; the size is part of the type and known at compile time (it can be specified explicitly or deduced from the initializer).
Elements are laid out sequentially in memory.
All elements share the same type.
Access to elements is constant time (O(1)).

Arrays occupy contiguous memory blocks. For example, consider:

int arr[3] = {10, 20, 30};

Memory Address | Value

----------------|------

0x1000 | 10 (arr[0])

0x1004 | 20 (arr[1])

0x1008 | 30 (arr[2])

(Addresses shown assuming a 4-byte int; actual sizes and addresses are implementation-defined.)

Arrays can be initialized in different ways:

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