Are Pointers and Arrays Interchangeable?

[beingchinmay]

As the preceding few pages have shown, pointers and arrays are strongly related. In fact, pointers and arrays are interchangeable in many cases. For example, a pointer that points to the beginning of an array can access that array by using either pointer arithmetic or array-style indexing. However, pointers and arrays are not completely interchangeable. For example, consider this fragment:

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int num[10];
int i;
for(i=0; i<10; i++) {
*num = i; // this is OK
num++; // ERROR -- cannot modify num
}]
'
Here, num is an array of integers. As the comments describe, while it is perfectly acceptable to apply the * operator to num (which is a pointer operation), it is illegal to modify num's value. The reason for this is that num is a constant that points to the beginning of an array. Thus, you cannot increment it. More generally, while an array name without an index does generate a pointer to the beginning of an array, it cannot be changed.