What is a strided array?

arrays data-structures sparse-matrix
Thomson picture Thomson · Aug 4, 2011 · Viewed 10.8k times · Source

There is also a counterpart which is called density array. What does this mean? I have done some search, but didn't get accurate information.

Answer

unkulunkulu picture unkulunkulu · Aug 4, 2011

Say you have a structure

struct SomeStruct {
    int someField;
    int someUselessField;
    int anotherUselessField;
};

and an array

struct SomeStruct array[10];

Then if you look at all the someFields in this array, they can be considered an array on their own, but they're not occupying consequent memory cells, so this array is strided. A stride here is sizeof(SomeStruct), i.e. the distance between two consequent elements of the strided array.

A sparse array mentioned here is a more general concept and actually a different one: a strided array doesn't contain zeroes in skipped memory cells, they're just not the part of the array.

Strided array is a generalization of usual (dense) arrays when stride != sizeof(element).

Related questions

How do I remove objects from an array in Java?

Given an array of n Objects, let's say it is an array of strings, and it has the following values: foo[0] = "a"; foo[1] = "cc"; foo[2] = "a"; foo[3] = "dd"; What do I have to do to delete/remove all the strings/…

Read More
Array versus linked-list

Why would someone want to use a linked-list over an array? Coding a linked-list is, no doubt, a bit more work than using an array and one may wonder what would justify the additional effort. I think insertion of new …

Read More
.NET data structures: ArrayList, List, HashTable, Dictionary, SortedList, SortedDictionary -- Speed, memory, and when to use each?

.NET has a lot of complex data structures. Unfortunately, some of them are quite similar, and I'm not always sure when to use one and when to use another. Most of my C# and Visual Basic books talk about them …

Read More