An array is an array and a pointer is a pointer, but in most cases array names are converted to pointers. A term often used is that they decay to pointers. Here is an array: int a[7]; a contains space for seven integers, and you can put a value in one of them with an … Read more
A pointer is a special type of variable, which can only contain an address of another variable. It cannot contain any data. You cannot “copy/store data into a pointer” – that doesn’t make any sense. You can only set a pointer to point at data allocated elsewhere. This means that in order for a pointer … Read more
Arrays on the type level An array type is denoted as T[n] where T is the element type and n is a positive size, the number of elements in the array. The array type is a product type of the element type and the size. If one or both of those ingredients differ, you get … Read more
No, you can’t. The compiler doesn’t know what the pointer is pointing to. There are tricks, like ending the array with a known out-of-band value and then counting the size up until that value, but that’s not using sizeof(). Another trick is the one mentioned by Zan, which is to stash the size somewhere. For … Read more
A pointer can be re-assigned: int x = 5; int y = 6; int *p; p = &x; p = &y; *p = 10; assert(x == 5); assert(y == 10); A reference cannot be re-bound, and must be bound at initialization: int x = 5; int y = 6; int &q; // error int &r … Read more
It’s said that arrays “decay” into pointers. A C++ array declared as int numbers [5] cannot be re-pointed, i.e. you can’t say numbers = 0x5a5aff23. More importantly the term decay signifies loss of type and dimension; numbers decay into int* by losing the dimension information (count 5) and the type is not int [5] any … Read more