C Primer Plus, Fourth Edition

Pointers and Multidimensional Arrays

How do pointers relate to multidimensional arrays? And why would you want to know? Functions that work with multidimensional arrays do so with pointers, so you need some further pointer background before working with such functions. As to the first question, let's look at some examples now to find the answer. To simplify the discussion, let's use a small array. Suppose you have this declaration:

int zippo[4][2];  /* an array of arrays of ints */

Then zippo, being the name of an array, is the address of the first element of the array. In this case, the first element of zippo is itself an array of two ints, so zippo is the address of an array of two ints. Let's analyze that further in terms of pointer properties: ...