How do I represent a hextile/hex grid in memory?

Question

Say I\'m building a board game with a hextile grid, like Settlers of Catan:

Note that

Answer 1

   2
7     3
   1   
6     4
   5

You can also try to 'flat' rows of your map. For this example it would be:

  2
7 1 3
6 5 4

Its sometimes more useful to have rows in one row:P