
2
Elements
2.1 Introduction
The world is filled with myriad pieces of data. From the color of your ca r to the
number of dollars in your bank account, data are everywhere. Let’s call each
piece of data an element
. A single element, by itself, is not very interesting
because there isn’t anything to compare it to, but elements are the building
blocks for the more complex data structures I will discuss later on in this
book. When a group of elements is a rranged into a structure, the elements
together can be called a data set.
Elements contain data or, alternatively, information. However, there are
constraints on the type of data that a particular element ...