By overloading the indexer you can create a class that looks and feels like an array but isn't. It will have O(1) get and set methods, can access an element at index 100, and yet still have the size of the elements inside of it. The SparseArray class
class SparseArray
{
Dictionary<int, string> array = new Dictionary<int, string>();
public string this[int i]
{
get
{
if(!array.ContainsKey(i))
{
return null;
}
return array[i];
}
set
{
if(!array.ContainsKey(i))
array.Add(i, value);
}
}
}