Arrays, Pointers, and Strings
Salvatore A. Buono · 2019
This chapter addresses a concept that combines variables into a collective or aggregated set, provided they share the same base data type and some common purpose. It explains this concept—properly referred to as an array —from both its singular and multidimensional perspectives. The chapter proposes another powerful concept known as the pointer and several other keywords and processing commands. There are also several traditional concepts intermixed in this chapter including bubble sorting, array searches, and calculations of mean, median, mode, and range. Arrays are referenced values associated with the collective heap. Multidimensional arrays are arrays specifically declared to hold more than one set of values. Pointer variables, like all other types of variables, need to be declared, but because they require a location to point to, they also need to be assigned before they can be referenced. A literal collection of characters, or a string, can be passed to a function using the same process as a standard array.