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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)
In modern JavaScript it's considered bad form to use the Array type as an associative array. Consensus is that the Object type and Map / WeakMap classes are best for this purpose. The reasoning behind this is that if Array is extended via prototype and Object is kept pristine, for and for-in loops will work as expected on associative 'arrays'.
The foreach statement in some languages has some defined order, processing each item in the collection from the first to the last. The foreach statement in many other languages, especially array programming languages, does not have any particular order.
For "one-dimensional" (single-indexed) arrays – vectors, sequence, strings etc. – the most common slicing operation is extraction of zero or more consecutive elements. Thus, if we have a vector containing elements (2, 5, 7, 3, 8, 6, 4, 1), and we want to create an array slice from the 3rd to the 6th items, we get (7, 3, 8, 6).
The vector maintains a certain order of its elements, so that when a new element is inserted at the beginning or in the middle of the vector, subsequent elements are moved backwards in terms of their assignment operator or copy constructor. Consequently, references and iterators to elements after the insertion point become invalidated.
The most frequently used general-purpose implementation of an associative array is with a hash table: an array combined with a hash function that separates each key into a separate "bucket" of the array. The basic idea behind a hash table is that accessing an element of an array via its index is a simple, constant-time operation.
sizeof cannot be used in C preprocessor expressions, such as #if, because it is an element of the programming language, not of the preprocessor syntax, which has no data types. The following example in C++ uses the operator sizeof with variadic templates.
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.