strings and arrays

C strings and arrays are just pointers.
In FORTRAN, a strings and arrays are basic entities.

strings

• strings are pointers to char conventionally terminated by '\0'
• C11 standard now defines char32_t; accommodates Unicode
• standard library has lots of functions
• note: the standard library is very low-level and crude. For heavy string manipulation, use a string module to do it conveniently and robustly.

arrays

• the name of the array is just a pointer to the first element
• a[i] means just *(a + i) using pointer arithmetic.
• note that the notation a[i][j] suggests an array of arrays
• bounds of multi-dimensional arrays must be compile-time constants (must be passed to subroutines)
• alternatively make real array-of-arrays
• stored so that elements that differ only in last subscript are adjacent in memory.
• there are C techniques for making arrays that work as FORTRAN.