pointers to arrays

[roy at phri.UUCP]

	Last week I was visiting with relatives.  Didn't have much to do so
I started flipping through some green-bar that was laying around.  Turned
out to be a C program.  It had the comment "in C, arrays don't have to be
rectangular".  The author of the program is an ex-physicist, ex-Fortran
hacker, nouveau-Lisp hacker who is a civilian employee of the Army working
on machine vision.  The ensuing conversation went something like:

Me: Hey, Bob, what do you mean "arrays don't have to be rectangular"?

Bob: They don't.  In C you can have a two dimensional array with each line
	a different size, using dynamic	memory allocation.

Me: Uh, you mean an array of pointers, don't you?

Bob: It's the same thing.

Me: No it's not.

Bob: That's what they taught us.

Me: Who taught you that?  Whoever taught you that should be shot!

Bob: DEC did.  We all went to a class in C programming DEC gave.
-- 
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016

"you can't spell deoxyribonucleic without unix!"