The Waite Group's C++ Primer Plus, Third Edition

Introducing Structures

Suppose you want to store information about a basketball player. You might want to store his or her name, salary, height, weight, scoring average, free-throw percentage, assists, and so on. You'd like some sort of data form that could hold all this information in one unit. An array won't do. Although an array can hold several items, each item has to be the same type. That is, one array can hold twenty ints and another can hold ten floats, but a single array can't store ints in some elements and floats in other elements.

The answer to your desire (the one about storing information about a basketball player) is the C++ structure. The structure is a more versatile data form than an array, for a single structure can hold items ...