On 04/21/2012 03:05 PM, Stephen Jones wrote:
> My C programming lies in cobwebs but from memory an array was a pointer
> to the zeroth index of a set of uniformly sized chunks of memory.
Yes and no. :) What you are describing is the feature where an array
decays to what you describe.
But there is also the concept of array in C, which is a collection of
elements side by side. When you apply sizeof to such a thing, you get
the size of the whole thing. So, the whole thing is the array.
But you are right, when passed to functions, they decay to "pointer to
first element."
> I am
> perplexed to find that in D a call to an array (of float vertices for
> example) cannot be accomplished by handing &v to functions that need the
> zeroth index. Is this because D holds a pointer to an array object and
> the zeroth index is accessed (via compiler background work) to &v[0]?
In D, arrays are what they should have been in C :). A pointer and a
size. Something the equivalent of the following (for the int type):
struct int_Array
{
int * elements;
size_t number_of_elements;
}
Correction: That is a slice (aka dynamic array). There is also the
fixed-length arrays (aka static arrays) in D.
If you pass the address of a slice, you are passing the address of such
a struct variable. So don't bother with the address at all, just pass
the array object by value.
Ali
