Multiple-Subscripted Arrays

• Arrays with 2 subscripts are often used to represent tables of values.
• To identify a particular element in the table, we specify:
  • its row (by convention, the 1st subscript), and
  • its column (by convention, the 2nd subscript). // Draw a picture
• Arrays in Java can have more than 2 subscripts.

  Can you think of something that might be well represented as an array with 3 subscripts?

• In Java, multiple-subscripted arrays are implemented as arrays of arrays:
  • A 2-dimensional array of int is implemented as an array of an array of int.
  • There really are only single-subscripted arrays, but an array's elements can be anything, including arrays.
  • This simplifies the language.
  • A good illustration of this uniform treatment is the inner loop of the printArray method: Clearly, element a[i] is itself an array; it has a length attribute.