11.2) Relationship Between Arrays And Pointers

An array variable is like a pointer that always points to a particular memory address, that of the first element in the array; it can't be incremented like a pointer variable, but we can use it in arithmetic expressions as a way of pointing to different array elements.

Consider the following example:

int x[5] = {1, 4, 9, 16, 25};
cout << x << endl;          // prints address of first element
cout << *x << endl;         // prints 1
cout << *(x+1) << endl;     // prints 4
*(x+2) = 0;                 // equivalent to x[2] = 0

• x is effectively a pointer to the first element, so *x is equivalent to x[0]
• x+1 is a pointer to the second element, so *(x+1) is equivalent to x[1], etc
• The size of the array is 5, so x points to the start of the array and x+5 points just past the end - which should sound familiar! (Remember iterators?)