C Programming: Visual Quickstart Guide

Allocating Arrays of Dynamic Size

In the previous section you allocated a block of memory and used it. However, it was a very small block of memory—only the size needed to store an integer. You could have allocated the same amount of memory statically by simply defining a regular integer variable in the program. And, although the amount of memory was determined at runtime, it was still of a fixed size (the size required to store an integer).

Memory management gets a lot more interesting if you determine the amount of memory to request from the pool at runtime, and if the requested amount is larger. In this section you will allocate room for an array of integers. To make it clear that the size of the array is dynamic, this program will ask the ...