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The relation between numbers appearing in an array declaration and the index of that array's last element also varies by language. In many languages (such as C), one should specify the number of elements contained in the array; whereas in others (such as Pascal and Visual Basic .NET ) one should specify the numeric value of the index of the ...
Each pointer has a type it points to, but one can freely cast between pointer types (but not between a function pointer and an object pointer). A special pointer type called the “void pointer” allows pointing to any (non-function) object, but is limited by the fact that it cannot be dereferenced directly (it shall be cast).
While arrays in C are fixed, pointers to them are interchangeable. This flexibility allows C to manipulate any length array using the same code. It also leaves the programmer with the responsibility not to write outside the allocated array, as no checks are built in into the language. In Pascal, arrays are a distinct type from pointers.
char * pc [10]; // array of 10 elements of 'pointer to char' char (* pa)[10]; // pointer to a 10-element array of char The element pc requires ten blocks of memory of the size of pointer to char (usually 40 or 80 bytes on common platforms), but element pa is only one pointer (size 4 or 8 bytes), and the data it refers to is an array of ten ...
In computer science, an array is a data structure consisting of a collection of elements (values or variables), of same memory size, each identified by at least one array index or key. An array is stored such that the position of each element can be computed from its index tuple by a mathematical formula.
In addition to support for vectorized arithmetic and relational operations, these languages also vectorize common mathematical functions such as sine. For example, if x is an array, then y = sin (x) will result in an array y whose elements are sine of the corresponding elements of the array x. Vectorized index operations are also supported.
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
A trivial example of an implicit data structure is an array data structure, which is an implicit data structure for a list, and requires only the constant overhead of the length; unlike a linked list, which has a pointer associated with each data element, which explicitly gives the relationship from one element to the next.