Name:
Sec: 06/22/2006
Programming Assignment #3
Using 2-Dimensional Arrays
Two dimensional arrays can be thought of as tables of data. A familiar example
of a table of data is the spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel, where you arrange
data into rows and columns. To declare a 2-Dimensional array in C, we do the
following:
const int NUM_ROWS = 8;
const int NUM_COLUMNS = 5;
int table[NUM_ROWS][NUM_COLUMNS];
The above, as you can probably guess, creates an array called table, that can hold/
represent a table with 8 rows and 5 columns. Of course, by changing the named
constants NUM_ROWS and/or NUM_COLUMNS, you can change the size of the
table that is being created and represented. However, unlike a spreadsheet, 2-
dimensional arrays in C must always start at index 0 for both the row index and
the column index. By convention, the first index is used to index the row number,
and the second index the column number. This convention is somewhat arbitrary,
they could be reversed, but in most of mathematics and programming you will see
people using this ordering when working with 2-dimensional tables, so it is a good
idea to just memorize this ordering.
So, a visual representation of the 2-dimensional table variable, declared above,
would be:
table [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]
[0]
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4] 25
[5]
[6]
[7]
To assign a value into a 2-dimensional table, we do the same as for a 1-
dimensional array, except we specify 2 indexes, the row, column. So, to assign
