Programming in C

260 Chapter 11 Pointers

When you define a pointer that is used to point to the elements of an array, you don’t

designate the pointer as type “pointer to array”; rather, you designate the pointer as

pointing to the type of element that is contained in the array.

If you have an array of characters called text,you could similarly define a pointer to

be used to point to elements in textwith the statement

char *textPtr;

To set valuesPtrto point to the first element in the valuesarray, you simply write

valuesPtr = values;

The address operator is not used in this case because the C compiler treats the appear-

ance of an array name without a subscript as a pointer to the array.Therefore, simply

specifying valueswithout a subscript has the effect of producing a pointer to the first

element of values(see Figure 11.9).

values[0]

values[1]

values[2]

values[3]

valuesPtr

values[99]

Figure 11.9 Pointer to an array element.

An equivalent way of producing a pointer to the start of valuesis to apply the address

operator to the first element of the array.Thus, the statement

valuesPtr = &values[0];

can be used to serve the same purpose as placing a pointer to the first element of

valuesin the pointer variable valuesPtr.