Handling large amounts of data with arrays
You might be wondering what happens when we have an app with lots of variables to keep track of. What about our Note to Self app with 100 notes or a high score table in a game with the top 100 scores? We could declare and initialize 100 separate variables like this:
Note note1; Note note2; Note note3; // 96 more lines like the above Note note100;
Or we could do this:
int topScore1; int topScore2; int topScore3; // 96 more lines like the above int topScore100;
Straight away, this might seem unwieldy, but what about when someone gets a new top score or we want to let our users sort the order that their notes are displayed in? Using the high scores scenario, we must shift the scores in every variable down one place. A nightmare begins:
topScore100 = topScore99; topScore99 = topScore98; topScore98 = topScore97; // 96 more lines like the above topScore1 = score;
There must be a better way. When we have a whole array of variables...