Educator

Arrays & Pointers

• Arrays are used for multiple pieces of data saved in a “chunk” of memory that the compiler will allocate
• The size of the array is declared using square brackets
• Square brackets are also used to specify which element of the array to work with in an expression
• Arrays may be multi-dimensional
• Arrays may be initialized at compile-time, which saves run-time and programmer effort for reference arrays
• Character strings are a special case for initialing character arrays
• Pointers are used to store the location, or the address, where data is stored, not the data itself
• Use reference and dereference operators when working with pointers
• Use pointer arithmetic when the pointer points into an array
• Arrays passed as function parameters are “call by reference”, never “call by value”, since copying a large array can be impractical
• Operators “new” and “delete” are used to allocate and de-allocate memory for arrays at run-time
• Here are links to more information about C++ arrays and pointers: http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/arrays/ http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/pointers/