Java How to Program (early objects), 9/e

7.2 Arrays

An array is a group of variables (called elements or components) containing values that all have the same type. Arrays are objects, so they’re considered reference types. As you’ll soon see, what we typically think of as an array is actually a reference to an array object in memory. The elements of an array can be either primitive types or reference types (including arrays, as we’ll see in Section 7.9). To refer to a particular element in an array, we specify the name of the reference to the array and the position number of the element in the array. The position number of the element is called the element’s index or subscript.

Figure 7.1 shows a logical representation of an integer array called c. This array contains 12 elements. ...