Array

In C, arrays can be thought of as pointers to consecutive areas of memory

• elements in an array are stored in physically adjacent blocks of memory
  • spec: This is why a pointer pointing to an array only points to the first element— because we can essentially keep checking "is the next memory block part of that array?"
• the name of an array is a synonym for the memory location of the first element of that array.
  • therefore, the assignment p = &x[0] is identical to p = x
  • also, what follows from this is that a reference to x[i] can also be written as *(x+i)
    • We can understand this as "x[5] is the address of the 5th element beyond x".
• When an array name is passed to a function, what is passed is the location of the initial element. Within the called function, the argument is a local variable, and so an array name parameter is a pointer (a variable containing an address)
• the syntax for accessing arrays is identical for that which can be used to dereference pointers
• array[i] is equivalent to *(array + i).
  • this fact shows that arrays are pointers to consecutive blocks of memory
• An array can be initialized with values like so: int days[] = { 1, 2, 3 }
  • If the size of the array is omitted in initialization, the compiler will count the number of elements

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Backlinks

• Value Object