I think you might be paraphrasing what the books say. What they usually say is that arrays and pointers are equivalent - which is true. It's easy to read that a

I think you might be paraphrasing what the books say. What they usually say is that arrays and pointers are equivalent - which is true. It's easy to read that as saying that arrays and pointers are identical, but that's not true at all. Just to make it confusing though, you can't pass an array by value to a function. It gets automatically converted to a pointer. Arrays are unique in the C language in this sense, and it contributes to the illusion that arrays and pointers are the same thing. (Try passing an array by reference, though, and all becomes clear.)