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* '''Structure of the program''': Locality occurs often because of the way in which computer programs are created, for handling decidable problems. Generally, related data is stored in nearby locations in storage. One common pattern in computing involves the processing of several items, one at a time. This means that if a lot of processing is done, the single item will be accessed more than once, thus leading to temporal locality of reference. Furthermore, moving to the next item implies that the next item will be read, hence spatial locality of reference, since memory locations are typically read in batches.
* '''Linear data structures''': Locality often occurs because code contains loops that tend to reference arrays or other data structures by indices. Sequential locality, a special case of spatial locality, occurs when relevant data elements are arranged and accessed linearly. For example, the simple traversal of elements in a one-dimensional array, from the base address to the highest element would exploit the sequential locality of the array in memory.<ref>Aho, Lam, Sethi, and Ullman. "Compilers: Principles, Techniques & Tools" 2nd ed. Pearson Education, Inc. 2007</ref> Equidistant locality occurs when the linear traversal is over a longer area of adjacent [[data structure]]s with identical structure and size, accessing mutually corresponding elements of each structure rather than each entire structure. This is the case when a [[Matrix (mathematics)|matrix]] is represented as a sequential matrix of rows and the requirement is to access a single column of the matrix.
* '''Efficiency of memory hierarchy use''': Although [[random-access memory]] presents the programmer with the ability to read or write anywhere at any time, in practice [[latency (engineering)|latency]] and throughput are affected by the efficiency of the [[Cache (computing)|cache]], which is improved by increasing the locality of reference. Poor locality of reference results in cache [[Thrashing (computer science)|thrashing]] and [[cache pollution]] and to avoid it, data elements with poor locality can be bypassed from cache.
== General usage ==
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