I know that they are used to store data, but I have a difficult time understanding exactly how to use them in a program.
In addition, I found this site with a tetris clone tutorial (the actual tutorial is missing). It uses arrays, but I can’t really make sense of how it works.
Here’s an example of the code –
public int[, ,] TShape = new int[4, 4, 2]
{
{{1, 0}, {0, 1}, {1, 1}, {2, 1}},
{{1, 0}, {0, 1}, {1, 1}, {1, 2}},
{{0, 0}, {1, 0}, {2, 0}, {1, 1}},
{{0, 0}, {0, 1}, {1, 1}, {0, 2}}};
Could it be that I’m looking too hard into this, or perhaps there’s something I’m not grasping about it?
Imagine you have 10 boxes. Now you want to clearly tell someone which box you are talking about. So you assign numbers to them, from 0 to 9. What you have now is an array of boxes, defined as:
box[ 10 ]
The number in the brackets tells you, how many of them are there. By default they are numbered from 0 to 9 (some languages allow to change this, but lets skip that for now). So if you are talking about the fifth box, its box[ 4 ] (since we index from 0!). Now imagine you open the box and see that there are five balls in it. This defines an array:
box[ 10 ][ 5 ]
A two dimensional array. How do you tell your friend which ball do you want to talk about? Again, you number them, this time from 0 to 4. How do you specify say the third ball in the seventh box? Simple: box[ 6 ][ 2 ]. And so on. Hope that helps.