Why can't we use double pointer to represent two dimensional arrays?

Question

Why can\'t we use double pointer to represent two dimensional arrays?

arr[2][5] = {\"hello\",\"hai\"};
**ptr = arr;

Here why doesn\'t the d

Answer 1

Making an array of pointers to each row in order to obtain an object that "looks like" a multidimensional array of variable size is an expensive design choice for the sake of syntactic sugar. Don't do it.

The correct way to do a variable-sized multidimensional array is something like:

if (w > SIZE_MAX/sizeof *m/h) goto error;
m = malloc(w * h * sizeof *m);
if (!m) goto error;
...
m[y*w+x] = foo;

If you want it to "look pretty" so you can write m[y][x], you should be using a different language, perhaps C++.