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too many variables

You can’t use a separate variable

for each line of data

Programming languages use variables to give you access to data in
memory. So if you are going to store the data from the results.txt
file in memory, it makes sense that you’ll need to use lots of variables to
access all the data, right?
But how many variables do you need?

Imagine the file just had three scores in it. You could write a program
that read each of the lines from the file and stored them in variables
called first_score, second_score, and third_score: Each line in the file gets a
first_ variable of its own.
score
The data in second_
the file 8.65 score

third_
8.65 9.12 score
9.12
8.45 8.45

But what if there were four scores in the file? Or five? Even worse, what
if there were 10,000 scores? You’d soon run out of variable names and
(possibly) memory in your computer, not to mention the wear and tear
on your fingers.

Well, the As are done
and that‛s the first volume
of all the entries from the
Encyclopedia Galactica stored
in memory. Time to tackle the
Bs, then the Cs, Ds, Es....

Sometimes, you need to deal with a whole bundle
of data, all at once. To do that, most languages give
you the array.

130 Chapter 4