Re: Question about arrays and no. of elements

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On May 15, 8:19 am, amal.alpho...@gmail.com wrote:
> If I define an array with say a million elements, and I only put data
> in 10 of them, is it actually a waste of space/time with the array or
> does Ada only create elements when there is data to put in (so it is
> efficient)?

"Ada" the language doesn't really dictate how arrays are represented,
but I think that any existing Ada compiler will allocate storage for a
million elements.  This may be a waste of space, but I don't
understand why you think it would be a waste of time: it is *more*
efficient, time-wise, to do it this way, because determining the
location of a particular array element is very simple, while any
scheme that tries to allocate memory only for elements actually used
is going to require significant overhead.

                                -- Adam