UMBC CMSC202, Computer Science II, Spring 1998, Sections 0101, 0102, 0103, 0104 and Honors

Thursday March 5, 1998

Assigned Reading:

• A Book on C:
• Programming Abstractions in C:
• Understanding Pointers in C: Chapters 4-6

Handouts (available on-line): Project 3

Topics Covered:

• Revisited pointers and types. Recall that a pointer to int is used to in the array notation to access an element of an array. For example, ptr2 in the fourth example from the previous lecture is a pointer to int. Then, the array notation ptr2[i] is used to access the i-th element of the array, assuming that ptr2 points to the first element of that array. Also, note that the notation *(ptr2 + i) is equivalent to the notation ptr2[i].

  The next question is: suppose ptr1 is a pointer to an array (as in the example above), then what does ptr1[i] mean? The answer is that this is only meaningful if you have an array of arrays. In the next example, SuperArray is an array of int_array's. Each int_array is an array of 17 integers. Now, if we assign the address of the first element of SuperArray to ArrayPtr, then ArrayPtr[2] refers to the third element of SuperArray, which is itself an array. In fact, we can continue on and use the notation ArrayPtr[2][13] to refer to the 14th integer element of the array that is the third element of SuperArray. So, in fact SuperArray is exactly a two dimensional array. (See sample run.)

• Revisited the realloc() function. In the program from the previous lecture, we used realloc() to extend the size of an array that was previously allocated through malloc(). Calling realloc() may cause the realloc() to copy the entire array to a new location. To avoid doing to many copies, we double the size of the array each time we reallocate memory for the array. This ensures that we do at most n copies for when the user enters n numbers. If we only increased the size of the array by 1 each time we reallocate, then we may do as many as 0.5 n² copies. So, it is really important that we double the size of the array each time we reallocate. We need not worry about wasting space with an array that is too large, because after the user has entered all the numbers, we can call reallocate again --- this time to reduce the size of the array to exactly the length needed to store the n numbers that the user entered.

• Discussed Project 3 extensively. One point that was neglected in the handout: row and column indices will start from 0.