Pointers and Arrays
Explore how arrays are represented in memory in C and how pointers enable efficient access through pointer arithmetic. Understand the relationship between array indexing and pointer operations, and learn the fundamentals of dynamic memory allocation using pointers.
We'll cover the following...
We'll cover the following...
Arrays under the hood
When we declare an array using an expression like int vec[5];, what is really happening behind the scenes, is that a block of memory is being allocated (on the stack in this case) large enough to hold five integers and the vec variable is a pointer that points to the first element in the array. When we index into the array with an expression like printf("vec[2] = %d\n", vec[2]); what is really happening is that C is using ...