This doesn't look like a function. What is this?

Question

A friend asked me to write a function in C to return the 100th element of an array. I\'m not very familiar with C, so I wasn\'t sure how to make a generic function that coul

Answer 1

This is the special funky way you can access arrays.

Let's recall that arrays can be treated like pointers, and you can use arithmetic.

For example:

let x be some arbitrary array:

int x[4];

Implies accessing x's 5th element, which is *(x+4).

Terrible example of memory layout:

x -> [0][1][2][3][4]

Now, the weird thing you can do with C arrays/pointers to blocks, is flip the number and variable in bracket notation.

x[4] is equal to 4[x]

Because they break down to:

*(x+4) and *(4+x)