I am a teaching assistant of a introductory programming course, and some students made this type of error:
char name[20];
scanf("%s",&name);
which is not surprising as they are learning... What is surprising is that, besides gcc warning, the code works (at least this part). I have been trying to understand and I wrote the following code:
void foo(int *v1, int *v2) {
if (v1 == v2)
printf("Both pointers are the same\n");
else
printf("They are not the same\n");
}
int main() {
int test[50];
foo(&test, test);
if (&test == test)
printf("Both pointers are the same\n");
else
printf("They are not the same\n");
}
Compiling and executing:
$ gcc test.c -g
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:12: warning: passing argument 1 of ‘foo’ from incompatible pointer type
test.c:13: warning: comparison of distinct pointer types lacks a cast
$ ./a.out
Both pointers are the same
Both pointers are the same
Can anyone explain why they are not different?
I suspect it is because I cannot get the address of an array (as I cannot have & &x
), but in this case the code should not compile.
Edit: I know that an array by itself is the same as the address of the first element, but this is not related to this problem, I think. For example:
int main() {
int a[50];
int * p = a;
printf("%d %d %d\n", p == a, p == &a[0], &p[0] == a);
printf("%d %d %d\n", p == &a, &p == a, &p == &a);
}
prints:
$ ./a.out
1 1 1
1 0 0
I don't understand why the second line begins with 1
.
An address-of operator is a mechanism within C++ that returns the memory address of a variable. These addresses returned by the address-of operator are known as pointers, because they "point" to the variable in memory. The address-of operator is a unary operator represented by an ampersand (&).
The ampersand symbol & is used in C++ as a reference declarator in addition to being the address operator.
double *num2;Declares and initializes an pointer variable named num2. c. Initializes a variable named *num2.
Remarks. The unary address-of operator ( & ) returns the address of (that is, a pointer to) its operand. The operand of the address-of operator can be a function designator or an lvalue that refers to an object that's not a bit field.
In your example, the array test
is a block of 50 ints
. So it looks like this:
| int | int | ... | int |
When you apply the unary &
operator to an array, you get the address of the array. Just like when you apply it to anything else, really. So &test
is a pointer that points to that block of 50 ints
:
(&test) -----------> | int | int | ... | int |
A pointer that points to an array of 50 ints has type int (*)[50]
- that's the type of &test
.
When you just use the name test
in any place where it's not the operand of either the sizeof
or unary-&
operators, it is evaluated to a pointer to its first element. So the test
that you pass to foo()
evaluates to a pointer to the test[0]
element:
(test) -----------------\
v
(&test) -----------> | int | int | ... | int |
You can see that these both are pointing to the same address - although &test
is pointing to the whole array, and test
is pointing to the first element of the array (which only shows up in the different types that those values have).
Actually, they are different, they don't have the same type at least.
But in C, the address of the array is the same as the address of the first element in the array that's why "they are not different", basically, they point to the same thing.
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