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Arrays

An array represents an indexed collection of elements of the same type (called the base type). Since each element has a unique index, arrays, unlike sets, can meaningfully contain the same value more than once.

Array Declaration

Array types are denoted by constructions in the following form:

type[array_length]

Each of the elements of an array is numbered from 0 through array_length - 1.

Every element of an array is of type and can be accessed by specifying array name followed by element’s index within brackets.

Here are a few examples of array declaration:

dim weekdays as byte[7]
dim samples  as word[50]

main:
  ' Now we can access elements of array variables, for example:
  samples[0] = 1
  if samples[37] = 0 then
    ' ...

Constant Arrays

Constant array is initialized by assigning it a comma-delimited sequence of values within parentheses. For example:

' Declare a constant array which holds number of days in each month:
const MONTHS as byte[12] = (31,28,31,30,31,30,31,31,30,31,30,31)

Note that indexing is zero based; in the previous example, number of days in January is MONTHS[0] and number of days in December is MONTHS[11].

The number of assigned values must not exceed the specified length. Vice versa is possible, when the trailing “excess” elements will be assigned zeroes.

For more information on arrays of char, refer to Strings.

Multi-dimensional Arrays

Multidimensional arrays are constructed by declaring arrays of array type. These arrays are stored in memory in such way that the right most subscript changes fastest, i.e. arrays are stored “in rows”. Here is a sample 2-dimensional array:

dim m as byte[5][10]   ' 2-dimensional array of size 5x10 

A variable m is an array of 5 elements, which in turn are arrays of 10 byte each. Thus, we have a matrix of 5x10 elements where the first element is m[0][0] and last one is m[4][9]. The first element of the 4th row would be m[3][0].