10 - Arrays and Structures – Organizing Data

Summary

VB Quip

[By the end of the 20th Century there will be a generation] to whom it will not be injurious to read a dozen quire of newspapers daily, to be constantly called to the telephone [and] to live half their time in a railway carriage or in a flying machine.

– Max Nordau in 1895

So far you have seen how a sequence of steps lets you build a program that will do your bidding. You've seen how decision structures give the computer the ability to make decisions. You've learned how to get the computer to repeat instructions, giving it the ability to do the same task over and over. And, you've taught it how to read and write. Well, it can't read and write, but it can access and store data in a file. All of these give the computer the ability to access and process data at remarkable speed. But, you've been limited to only a handful of names and numbers – only what you could hold in your hand and keep track of in your head. You've been forced to discard one thing in order to grab the next. It's as if the world was a full-screen movie and you're stuck looking at stills in the family photo album. Enter arrays. With an array you can grab an armful of data and process it as you wish. Instead of stills on Grandma's porch, you've got a DVD on HD and control of the remote.