1.2: Contiguous Implementation
Read this introduction to the contiguous data structure type, which arrays are an example of. "Contiguous" refers to the memory occupied by the data structure being grouped serially by address. For instance, if an integer occupies four bytes, those four bytes are guaranteed to begin at the memory address of the first byte and end at the memory address of the fourth byte, so that those four bytes occupy memory addresses M, M+1, M+2, and M+3. One only has to reference address M to get the entire value of the integer. The same is true of contiguous arrays of any dimension. The cells of the array are guaranteed to occupy serially-grouped (contiguous) memory. Otherwise, the array can not be allocated.