Arrays

New idea

Box 700,000 as fast as box 1

Imagine a row of 1,000,000 numbered boxes. Asking for box 700,000 takes the computer no longer than asking for box 1. It never counts along the row. How?

The trick is an array, a row of boxes sitting right next to each other in memory, each holding one value. Each box has a position number called its index.

Here's the odd part: the first box has index 0, not 1. So an array of 3 values has indexes 0, 1 and 2.