For those of you who program in Python:

Python doesn’t have arrays – it has lists!

In theory, they are NOT the same!

You must be aware of this for your exam!

An ‘Array’ is collection of data WHICH HAS THE SAME DATA TYPE.

An ‘Array’ uses a STATIC AREA OF MEMORY and therefore we need to STATE HOW BIG THE ARRAY NEEDS TO BE and WHAT TYPE OF DATA IT WILL HOLD before data is added to it. An array therefore CANNOT GROW OVERTIME– you CAN’T APPEND DATA to it!

For those of you who program in Python:

Python doesn’t have arrays – it has lists!

In theory, they are NOT the same!

You must be aware of this for your exam!

A ‘List’ on the other hand can contain data which DOESN’T HAVE TO BE OF THE SAME DATA TYPE.

A ‘List’ uses memory DYNAMICALLY, which means that it uses different areas of memory if it needs to and as a result CAN GROW– DATA CAN BE APPENDED (added) to it!

Records

As we learnt earlier, arrays can only store data of the same type. For example, an array may store only string data, or integer data, but it cannot contain a mix of data types.

Records however, are a data structure that allows different types of data to be stored together.

This would be really useful when storing data about a person, such as a person’s name (string), age (integer) and whether or not they liked Marmite (Boolean).