14.3 A SUITABLE DATA STRUCTURE

In Chapter 5, we used arrays to store lists; this might be a suitable choice here since the size is to be specified and the data set is not large. There are two data items for each individual, name and grade. We could create a 'record' structure having two fields for the purpose, and Case Study 2 (Chapter 15) will use that approach. However, an alternative uses two 'parallel' arrays, one for grades and the other for names, where the same subscript defines an individual's data for both arrays (Figure 14.1).

Figure 14.1. Parallel arrays for the list