Question

when reffering to 2d lists which is the correct way the rows/columns are ordered? I am having trouble following some of the q&a on this site and others ….I always imagined it as the second way I show but idk?

[[a ,b, c],[d, e, f], [g, h, i], [j, k, l]]

is for easy visualization this?:

• [a, b, c]
• [d, e, f]
• [g, h, i]
• [j, k, l]

(making it 4 rows x 3 columns)

or this:

• [a, d, g, j]
• [b, e, h, k]
• [c, f, i, l]

Answer 1

neither way is “wrong,” as there is no right or wrong answer. rows and columns don’t have meaning until displayed in a certain way. in memory, it’s all stored linearly.

syntactically, all that matters is that if your 2d array is called array, then array[0] is a 1-dimensional array, and array[0][0] is an item.

however, it’s very unusual for it to be considered any way besides the first way, as in English we read left to right, top to bottom.