KatolaZ <kato...@freaknet.org> writes: [...]
> and the reason is that arrays in C are just syntactic sugar around > memory addresses. This has nothing to do with polymorphism or generic > programming, and is indeed much lower-level and more basic than > that. Simply put, arrays do not effectively *exist* in C. This is wrong. Arrays in C represent a finite set of consecutively allocated objects of a certain type. For historical reasons (compatibility with BCPL and B[*]), array indexing doesn't exist in C: It's by definition equivalent to pointer arithmetic an expression with type 'array of T' are automatically converted to a pointer of type 'pointer to T' pointing to the first element of the array. [*] In both languages, an array declaration instructed the compiler to reserve a certain number of consecutive 'cells' (the only data type available to both languages) and initialize the declared object with a pointer to these cell range. The C convention was adopted to enable structures containing arrays to 'map naturally to the memory of the machine' while still enabling B programs expecting to get a pointer to an array when trying to access it to work. _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
