Programming Fundamentals/Math Statistics with Arrays

Overview Statistics is a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. Common statistical methods include mean (or average) and standard deviation.Wikipedia: Statistics Discussion Arrays can store words, letters/characters (strings) and numbers (integers/floats). Any type of array containing words, numbers or a combination can use a built-in function like len(Python exclusive) to find the number of elements in an array to help display output and parse lines. All arrays can also handle functions that allow the user to sort array values from highest to lowest (or vice versa). Other functions are only intended to handle arrays with numbers. For example, When arrays contain numbers, the elements of the array can be added together using the sum function. Since the built-in sum function cannot handle strings without producing an unsupported operand type error, we use this function only to add numbers, rather than join strings together. We will continue learning about the sum function (also known as totaling) in this module. In the example below, the sum function totals the array passed to it. Other mathematical functions often associated with statistics such as: average, count, minimum, maximum, standard deviation, etc. are often developed for processing arrays. Pseudocode Function Main Declare Integer Array ages[5] Declare Integer total Assign ages = [49, 48, 26, 19, 16] Assign total = sum(ages) Output "Total age is: " & total End Function sum (Integer Array array) Declare Integer total Declare Integer index Assign total = 0 For index = 0 to Size(array) - 1 Assign total = total + array[index] End Return Integer total Output Total age is: 158 Key Terms sum is a built-in function, which adds the elements of an array together. len is a built-in function and it returns the number of items in an object. References cnx.org: Programming Fundamentals – A Modular Structured Approach using C++