arrayspecific

Arrayspecific is an adjective and noun used in computer science to describe characteristics, operations, or optimizations that pertain to arrays as data structures, rather than to scalars or other containers. In practice, array-specific features are those that depend on an array's shape, dimensionality, strides, or memory layout and that apply to the entire collection of elements.

Common array-specific operations include indexing, slicing, reshaping, transposition, reductions along axes, and element-wise arithmetic that is applied in a vectorized fashion. Many programming languages and libraries expose array-specific semantics through broadcasting rules, views vs copies, and in-place updates. Examples include NumPy-style broadcasting, MATLAB array operations, and SIMD-accelerated kernels in lower-level languages.

Considerations for array-specific design include performance implications from memory contiguity, cache locality, and allocation strategy. Broadcasting can avoid unnecessary copies, but may impose shape compatibility constraints and reduce readability if used implicitly. Safety concerns include bounds checking, dimensional alignment, and aliasing when in-place operations modify the same memory region.

In usage, the term is often employed to distinguish array-centric APIs from scalar- or list-based interfaces, signaling that an operation applies uniformly to an entire array or its elements. It is not a formal standard, but a descriptive descriptor used across languages and frameworks to characterize array-oriented programming.

See also vectorization, broadcasting, array programming, matrix language.