Return to Computer science topics

In computer science, an associative array, map, symbol table, or dictionary is an abstract data type composed of a collection of (key, value) pairs, such that each possible key appears at most once in the collection.

• Associative array, an abstract data structure model composed of key-value pairs, often implemented as a hash table or search tree

or various kinds of the above, such as:

• Bit array or bit vector
• Dynamic array, allocated at run time
• Jagged array, a multidimensional array where the rows have different lengths individually
• Parallel array of records, with each field stored as a separate array
• Sparse array, with most elements omitted, to store a sparse matrix
• Variable-length array