You could extend point 1. by making a convention of always declaring pointers to arrays like so: int (*data)[datalen]; This requires you to dereference it o

You could extend point 1. by making a convention of always declaring pointers to arrays like so: int (*data)[datalen]; This requires you to dereference it once to get an array, then dereference it a second time to get a value. The advantage is that the array value can be used the same as an normal array on the stack, including passing it to the array length macro you describe.