Disadvantages of arrays

Question

I want to know about the disadvantages of using arrays, Can anyone help me?

ediga abhilash · Answer

the main disadvatage of using arrays are that is memory wastage....for eg:if we give inta[10]; and if we use only five values during the execution of the programm.so according to my declartion total memory required id 2*10=20bytes of memory is required.....but if i use only 5 values in my program then total memory reqquired will be 2*5=10 bytes...i hope this might answer might help you all..............thank you.!

Vulpes · Answer

You can sort the array like this (I've re-ordered it so it's not sorted to start with): int[] myIntArray = new int[5] { 2, 1, 5, 3, 4}; Array.Sort(myIntArray); foreach(int i in myIntArray) Console.WriteLine(i); // 1 2 3 4 5

Chandra Sekhar K · Answer

Consider the following array: int [] myIntArray = new int [5] { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 }; How we do we sort the array items? In this case, we dont have any pre-defined Sort function. So we use ArrayList in this case. But ArrayList can lead to runtime error rather than compile time error when we are reading the values from the ArrayList(i.e when the arraylist has different types of datas like integer,string). ArrayList arr= new ArrayList(); arr.Add(1); arr.Add("one"); foreach(int a in arr) // this will lead to runtime error when it reads the "one" from the arraylist. { console.write(a); }

Vulpes · Answer

Although being of fixed size can be a disadvantage, type-safety is not a disadvantage to my mind. Boxing/unboxing is only necessary when you have an array of type 'object' or an array of some interface type and you're assigning value types(int, double, char, enums etc) to the elements of the array. In the case of an ArrayList, boxing is always necessary when you add value types to it because everything's stored internally as type 'object'. The System.Array class provides methods to sort arrays and to do various other manipulations including resizing, though the Resize() method actually creates a new array of the appropriate size and copies over the elements from the original one: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.array.aspx

Chandra Sekhar K · Answer

1. The size of the array is fixed while declaration itself. 2. the size cant be increased/decreased dynamically. ( ArrayList supports this) 3. Its type-safe. 4. Needs to explicitly do boxing/unboxing when storing another data type. ( ArrayList allows this ) 5. Doesnot provide default methods for Sorting, Manipulating and other basic stuffs. ( List supports this).

Mamta M · Answer

One of the biggest drawbacks of arrays is that elements in the arrays are stored at contiguous locations...this means that even if some other location is free, it will not occupy that location but will instead place all elements of the array adjacent to one another. This can be a huge problem if your arrays are large, say, if you have 1000's of elements in one array, all 1000 would be stored next to one another. Many languages dont allow dynamic sized arrays and also it's difficult to add/remove elements...not impossible, but just tedious with lot of logic involved. Hence for large collections, people prefer other data structures (such as linked lists).

Disadvantages of arrays

Answers (6)