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In computer programming, array slicing is an operation that extracts a subset of elements from an array and packages them as another array, possibly in a different dimension from the original. Common examples of array slicing are extracting a substring from a string of characters, the " ell " in "h ell o", extracting a row or column from a two ...
Many languages allow generic copying by one or either strategy, defining either one copy operation or separate shallow copy and deep copy operations. [1] Note that even shallower is to use a reference to the existing object A, in which case there is no new object, only a new reference. The terminology of shallow copy and deep copy dates to ...
Such arrays can also be views into memory buffers allocated by C/C++, Python, and Fortran extensions to the CPython interpreter without the need to copy data around, giving a degree of compatibility with existing numerical libraries. This functionality is exploited by the SciPy package, which wraps a number of such libraries (notably BLAS and ...
For example, strings and arrays are passed by reference, but when modified, they are duplicated if they have non-zero reference counts. This allows them to act as value types without the performance problems of copying on assignment or making them immutable. [8] In the Qt framework, many types are copy-on-write ("implicitly shared" in Qt's terms).
In addition to support for vectorized arithmetic and relational operations, these languages also vectorize common mathematical functions such as sine. For example, if x is an array, then y = sin (x) will result in an array y whose elements are sine of the corresponding elements of the array x. Vectorized index operations are also supported.
Some people (including Guido van Rossum himself) have called this parameter-passing scheme "call by object reference". An object reference means a name, and the passed reference is an "alias", i.e. a copy of the reference to the same object, just as in C/C++. The object's value may be changed in the called function with the "alias", for example:
Furthermore, moving to the next item implies that the next item will be read, hence spatial locality of reference, since memory locations are typically read in batches. Linear data structures: Locality often occurs because code contains loops that tend to reference arrays or other data structures by indices. Sequential locality, a special case ...
In array languages, operations are generalized to apply to both scalars and arrays. Thus, a+b expresses the sum of two scalars if a and b are scalars, or the sum of two arrays if they are arrays. An array language simplifies programming but possibly at a cost known as the abstraction penalty.