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The arrays are heterogeneous: a single array can have keys of different types. PHP's associative arrays can be used to represent trees, lists, stacks, queues, and other common data structures not built into PHP. An associative array can be declared using the following syntax:
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.
Thus, if we have a vector containing elements (2, 5, 7, 3, 8, 6, 4, 1), and we want to create an array slice from the 3rd to the 6th items, we get (7, 3, 8, 6). In programming languages that use a 0-based indexing scheme, the slice would be from index 2 to 5. Reducing the range of any index to a single value effectively eliminates that index.
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.
The dope vector is a complete handle for the array, and is a convenient way to pass arrays as arguments to procedures. Many useful array slicing operations (such as selecting a sub-array, swapping indices, or reversing the direction of the indices) can be performed very efficiently by manipulating the dope vector.
In Python NumPy arrays implement the flatten method, [note 1] while in R the desired effect can be achieved via the c() or as.vector() functions. In R , function vec() of package 'ks' allows vectorization and function vech() implemented in both packages 'ks' and 'sn' allows half-vectorization.
Support for multi-dimensional arrays may also be provided by external libraries, which may even support arbitrary orderings, where each dimension has a stride value, and row-major or column-major are just two possible resulting interpretations. Row-major order is the default in NumPy [19] (for Python).
However, a single patron may be able to check out multiple books. Therefore, the information about which books are checked out to which patrons may be represented by an associative array, in which the books are the keys and the patrons are the values. Using notation from Python or JSON, the data structure would be: