Ivor Horton's Beginning Visual C++ 2012

HANDLING MULTIPLE DATA VALUES OF THE SAME TYPE

You already know how to declare and initialize variables of various types that each holds a single item of information; I’ll refer to single items of data as data elements. The most obvious extension to the idea of a variable is to be able to reference several data elements of a particular type with a single variable name. This would enable you to handle applications of a much broader scope.

Let’s consider an example of where you might need this. Suppose that you needed to write a payroll program. Using a separately named variable for each individual’s pay, their tax liability, and so on, would be an uphill task to say the least. A much more convenient way to handle such a problem would be to reference an employee by some kind of generic name — employeeName to take an imaginative example — and to have other generic names for the kinds of data related to each employee, such as pay, tax, and so on. Of course, you would also need some means of picking out a particular employee from the whole bunch, together with the data from the generic variables associated with them. This kind of requirement arises with any collection of like entities that you want to handle in your program, whether they’re baseball players or battleships. Naturally, C++ provides you with a way to deal with this.

Arrays

The basis for the solution to all of these problems is provided by the array. An array is simply a number of memory locations called array elements ...