Arrays

Abstract

You’ll often need to store many data values of a particular kind in your programs. In a program to track the performance of a basketball team, you might want to store the scores for a season of games and the scores for individual players. You could then output the scores for a particular player over the season or work out an ongoing average as the season progresses. Armed with what you’ve learned so far, you could write a program that does this using a different variable for each score. However, if there are a lot of games in the season, this will be rather tedious because you’ll need as many variables for each player as there are games. All your basketball scores are really the same kind of thing. The values are different, but they’re all basketball scores. Ideally, you want to be able to group these values together under a single name—perhaps the name of the player—so that you wouldn’t need separate variables for each item of data.