Overview of Container Mechanisms

Abstract

In this chapter we are going to examine a number of ways that a programmer can store relatively large amounts of data for a program. We have already examined arrays, which use dense storage, and we saw that we can allocate such storage either automatically or on the free store. Two other methods of importance and frequent use are linked storage and hashed storage. Normally, linked storage is done only in the free store and hashed storage may be a combination of linked and dense storage and may involve either automatic or free store data or even a combination.