Handling large amounts of data with arrays
You might be wondering what happens when we have an app with lots of variables to keep track of. What about our Note to self app with 100 notes, or a high-score table in a game with the top 100 scores? We can declare and initialize 100 separate variables as follows:
var note1 = Note() var note2 = Note() var note3 = Note() // 96 more lines like the above var note100 = Note()
Or, by using the high scores example we might use something like the following code:
var topScore1: Int var topScore2: Int // 96 more lines like the above var topScore100: Int
Immediately, this code can seem unwieldy, but what about when someone gets a new top score, or if we want to let our users sort the order that their notes are displayed in? Using the high scores scenario, we must shift the scores in every variable down one place. This is the beginning of a nightmare, as shown in the following code:
topScore100 = topScore99; topScore99 = topScore98; topScore98 = topScore97;...