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The following list contains syntax examples of how a range of element of an array can be accessed. In the following table: first – the index of the first element in the slice; last – the index of the last element in the slice; end – one more than the index of last element in the slice; len – the length of the slice (= end - first)
The base index of an array can be freely chosen. Usually programming languages allowing n-based indexing also allow negative index values and other scalar data types like enumerations, or characters may be used as an array index. Using zero based indexing is the design choice of many influential programming languages, including C, Java and Lisp ...
To illustrate, suppose a is the memory address of the first element of an array, and i is the index of the desired element. To compute the address of the desired element, if the index numbers count from 1, the desired address is computed by this expression: + (), where s is the size of each element. In contrast, if the index numbers count from ...
Python has array index and array slicing expressions in lists, denoted as a[key], a [start: stop] or a [start: stop: step]. Indexes are zero-based, and negative indexes are relative to the end. Slices take elements from the start index up to, but not including, the stop index.
Array data types are most often implemented as array structures: with the indices restricted to integer (or totally ordered) values, index ranges fixed at array creation time, and multilinear element addressing. This was the case in most "third generation" languages, and is still the case of most systems programming languages such as Ada, C ...
The basis behind array programming and thinking is to find and exploit the properties of data where individual elements are similar or adjacent. Unlike object orientation which implicitly breaks down data to its constituent parts (or scalar quantities), array orientation looks to group data and apply a uniform handling.
To use column-major order in a row-major environment, or vice versa, for whatever reason, one workaround is to assign non-conventional roles to the indexes (using the first index for the column and the second index for the row), and another is to bypass language syntax by explicitly computing positions in a one-dimensional array.
General array slicing can be implemented (whether or not built into the language) by referencing every array through a dope vector or descriptor – a record that contains the address of the first array element, and then the range of each index and the corresponding coefficient in the indexing formula.