Computers and heat density

[der Mouse]

> No, they aren't.  But I personally never remembered if C stores
> arrays row major, or column major.

I can't either, but that's because I can't recall which way is row
major and which way is column major.  But when I recall that
	int foo[20];
declares foo to be int[20], and
	int bar[10][20];
declares bar[x] to be int[20] ("int (bar[10])[20];") then it all makes
sense.

> But really, it gets to me when I see code like:
> 	for (i = 0 ; i < MAX ; i++)
> 		foo[i] = 0;
> when it could easily be replaced with:
> 	memset(foo,0,sizeof(foo));

While I realize you said "when", I would point out that this is a valid
replacement only when foo is an integral type.  If foo is float or
pointer, this is not a safe thing to do (except in code that's
sufficiently hardware-specific that you can assume the in-memory layout
of the relevant data type - and know that all-0-bits is TRT).

Also, note that this assumes that sizeof(foo) is MAX*sizeof(foo[0]),
though I realize this is easy to fix in the memset call.

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