In software engineering, algorithms get complex; part of being a good programmer is breaking down things into structured components and providing adequate documentation for your work, to both ensure you fully understand why what you did works and so others can better understand it during code review. Using an array for this is an incredibly sloppy thing to do, because there is no need for it and you would still need an algorithm to calculate the values in the array--you should not add layers of complexity to your code that have no benefit. The only reason to use an array for this type of thing would be if you knew there would be a future need to perform additional calculations on the same set of data. At my job, an attempt to use an array for something like this would be kicked back in a code review and never make it to release.