>>20Yes, if you are loading data into memory and already know the size, and will only be reading from that or making changes that don't alter the size of any element, arrays are great. But almost anything else has a better data structure available. For example, if you will be doing lots of searching, you should use a sort of self-balancing tree. The O(lg(n)) worst case time complexity will save a lot of time more than the time that saved by having the data block in the cache.
And the whole thing falls apart when storing variable length things like strings anyway, since they still have to be dereferenced. Speaking of strings, I don't see why you imperative subniggers bitch about Lisp here, Huskull is the one that stores strings as linked lists.