# Arrays and Pointers

## Arrays as Blocks of Memory

An array is a big continuous chunk of memory. To get the first item in an array of 1-byte objects, we just look at the first byte of that array. The second item is the second byte. And in general the nth item is the nth byte in that chunk of memory.

If we have an array of 4-byte objects like int, then the first item is the first four bytes of memory. The second item is bytes five to eight. And so on.

Another way to view it is if we have a pointer to the first byte of memory in that array, then we can find a simple formula that makes the pointer point to the nth byte of that array. If we have 1-byte objects, we only need to look at ptr + (n-1).

## Pointer Arithmetic

Extending this idea, you would think that if we have 4-byte objects, to get the nth item in the array, we want to look at bytes ptr + 4*(n-1) until ptr + 4*(n-1) + 3. But it’s not!

If you have a pointer and you add an integer to it, it automatically multiplies the added integer by the size of type of the pointer. So an int pointer, if you add 1 to it, will actually get incremented by 4. If you add 3 to it, will get incremented by 12. In some way, this makes pointers easier to work with if you think about them as arrays. Some people might find this strange, but that’s just the way C++ was designed. This is called pointer arithmetic, by the way. Most of the time, you just want to increment and decrement pointers, and it generally works out really well. In case you really need to mess with memory addresses (which you almost never should), you can just typecast your pointers into long long before doing the operations, then typecast them back to your prefered pointer type.

## Zero-based Indexing

Earlier we mentioned that to get the nth item in an array, we look at ptr + (n-1). But if we just started counting from 0, then the problem solves itself! The 0th item is at address ptr, the 1st item is at address ptr + 1, the 2nd item is at address ptr + 2. And the kth item is at address ptr + k. And this simplification is the reason why programmers like to count from 0.

As a side note, some other programming languages are not zero-indexed and their compilers automatically add -1 when arrays are accessed.

## The [] Operator and the * Operator

By now you might be thinking: "Wait a minute! I've been doing array access without all this pointer stuff. It's just arr[x] right?" And I’m here to tell you that array access by doing arr[x] is completely the same as *(arr+x). The compiler turns them into the exact same processor instructions. So if you have a pointer that points to a single variable and not an array, instead of doing *ptr you can just as well do ptr[0]. It might not make intuitive sense when you're reading some code that’s not yours though. Most people expect [] for arrays and * for single values.