When an array is declared, compiler allocates sufficient amount of memory to contain all the elements of the array. Base address i.e address of the first element of the array is also allocated by the compiler.
int arr[5] = { 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 };
Assuming that the base address of arr is 1000 and each integer requires two bytes, the five elements will be stored as follows:
Here variable arr will give the base address, which is a constant pointer pointing to the first element of the array, arr[0]. Hence arr contains the address of arr[0] i.e 1000. In short, arr has two purpose - it is the name of the array and it acts as a pointer pointing towards the first element in the array.
arr is equal to &arr[0] by default
We can also declare a pointer of type int to point to the array arr.
int *p;
p = arr;
// or,
p = &arr[0]; //both the statements are equivalent.
Now we can access every element of the array arr using p++ to move from one element to another.
NOTE: You cannot decrement a pointer once incremented. p-- won't work.
In the second approach memory wastage is more, hence it is prefered to use pointer in such cases. When we say memory wastage, it doesn't means that the strings will start occupying less space, no, characters will take the same space, but when we define array of characters, a contiguos memory space is located equal to the maximum size of the array, which is a wastage, which can be avoided if we use pointers instead.
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