What are Arrays?

In everyday life, an arrangement of objects, pictures, or numbers in columns and rows is called an array. The following pictures show some arrays around us. Can you think of more examples of arrays?

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In computer science, an array is a fundamental data structure available in most programming languages. It consists of indexed sequence of elements, all the same type. Because arrays store information in adjoining blocks of memory they are considered contiguous data structures. Performance-wise it is very fast to look up an element contained in an array given the element’s index. A proper array implementation guarantees a constant O(1) access time.