Why do we need to specify the column size when passing a 2D array as a parameter?

c arrays parameters multidimensional-array parameter-passing
Denji the Script Kiddie picture Denji the Script Kiddie · Oct 10, 2012 · Viewed 29.5k times · Source

Why can't my parameter be

void example(int Array[][]){ /*statements*/}

Why do I need to specify the column size of the array? Say for example, 3

void example(int Array[][3]){/*statements*/}

My professor said its mandatory, but I was coding before school started and I remembered that there was no syntactical or semantic error when I made this my parameter? Or did I miss something?

Answer

Maksim Skurydzin picture Maksim Skurydzin · Oct 10, 2012

When it comes to describing parameters, arrays always decay into pointers to their first element.

When you pass an array declared as int Array[3] to the function void foo(int array[]), it decays into a pointer to the beginning of the array i.e. int *Array;. Btw, you can describe a parameter as int array[3] or int array[6] or even int *array - all these will be equivalent and you can pass any integer array without problems.

In case of arrays of arrays (2D arrays), it decays to a pointer to its first element as well, which happens to be a single dimensional array i.e. we get int (*Array)[3].

Specifying the size here is important. If it were not mandatory, there won't be any way for compiler to know how to deal with expression Array[2][1], for example.

To dereference that a compiler needs to compute the offset of the item we need in a contiguous block of memory (int Array[2][3] is a contiguous block of integers), which should be easy for pointers. If a is a pointer, then a[N] is expanded as start_address_in_a + N * size_of_item_being_pointed_by_a. In case of expression Array[2][1] inside a function (we want to access this element) the Array is a pointer to a single dimensional array and the same formula applies. The number of bytes in the last square bracket is required to find size_of_item_being_pointed_by_a. If we had just Array[][] it would be impossible to find it out and hence impossible to dereference an array element we need.

Without the size, pointers arithmetics wouldn't work for arrays of arrays. What address would Array + 2 produce: advance the address in Array 2 bytes ahead (wrong) or advance the pointer 3* sizeof(int) * 2 bytes ahead?

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