Question

I am working on my data in a C/C++ program, which is 2 dimensional. Here my value is calculated for pair-wise and here values would be same for foo[i][j] and foo[j][i].

Thus if I implement it by using a simple 2 dimensional array, half of my space would be wasted. So what would be best data structure to represent this lower/upper triangular matrix.

Regards,

Answer 1

Really, you’re best off just using a regular two dimensional matrix. RAM is pretty cheap. If you really don’t want to do that, then you can build a one-dimensional array with the right number of elements and then figure out how to access each element. For example, if the array is structured like this:

    j
    1234
i 1 A
  2 BC
  3 DEF
  4 GHIJ

and you have it stored as a one dimensional array, left to right, you’d access element C (2, 2) with array[3]. You can work out a function to go from [i][j] to [n] but I won’t spoil your fun. But you don’t have to do this unless the triangular array in question is really huge or you’re very concerned about space.