云南农业大学计算机导论课件Chapter11 Data Structures.pptVIP

Although single variables are used extensively in programming languages, they cannot be used to solve complex problems efficiently. In this chapter, we introduce data structures. A data structure uses a collection of related variables that can be accessed individually or as a whole. In other words, a data structure represents a set of data items with a specific relationship between then. We discuss three data structures in this chapter: arrays, records, and linked lists. Most programming languages have an implicit implementation of the first two. The third, however, is simulated using pointers and records. 11.1 ARRAYS Imagine you have a problem that requires 20 numbers to be processed. You need to read them, process them, and print them. You must also keep these 20 numbers in memory for the duration of the program. To process large amounts of data, you need a powerful data structure such as an array. An array is a fixed-size, sequenced collection of elements of the same data type. The array as a whole has a name, number, but each member can be accessed individually using its subscript. The advantages of the array would be limited if you didn’t also have programming constructs that allow you to process the data more conveniently. Fortunately, there is a powerful set of programming constructs, loops, that makes array processing easy. ARRAY APPLICATIONS Frequency Arrays A frequency array shows the number of elements with the same value found in a series of numbers. Histograms A histogram is a pictorial representation of a frequency array. Instead of printing the values of the elements to show the frequency of each number, you print a histogram in the form of a bar chart. For example, Figure 11.6 is a histogram for a set of numbers in the range 0 to 19. TWO-DIMENSIONAL ARRAY The arrays discussed so far are known as one-dimensional arrays because the data are organized linearly in only one direction. Many