array of structures, or structure of arrays?

Question

Hmmm. I have a table which is an array of structures I need to store in Java. The naive don\'t-worry-about-memory approach says do this:

public class Record          


        

Answer 1

How are you going to access the data? If the accesses over the fields are always coupled, then use the first option, if you are going to process the fields by its own, then the second option is better.

See this article in wikipedia: Parallel Array

A good example about when it's more convenient to have separate arrays could be simulations where the numerical data is packed together in the same array, and other attributes like name, colour, etc. that are accessed just for presentation of the data in other array.