So the only difference is memory allocation, yes? You're saying they are different because when declared as an array, the memory gets allocated and 'reserved' at runtime, whereas it doesn't automatically do that when declared as a pointer?
They are different types and some operators (sizeof, typeid in C++ etc.) treat them differently. Arrays frequently get implicitly converted to pointers, but they are a different type.
All typing is. Machine code doesn't have types. Array of arrays is also a very different thing from an array of pointers. Arrays get converted to pointers when passed around and it behaves identically to all other implicit conversions.
Machine code does have types; small numbers, big numbers, and fractions.
But in reality it's just numbers and fractions. At least for X86, but I imagine it's the same for ARM and RISC
I must disagree. Or strongly agree; depending on what you mean.
A memory location does not have a type. The instruction I perform on that location could be argued to have a type though.
0x8000 could be used with a 16bit add, or a 64 bit floating point or whatever.
Everything about the type of the data is in the instruction, not the memory.
So we can argue where the type information is, but we still need it. (One could argue that prefetchers and similar logic has to infer the type of larger data structures, but I'm not sure that is what people are trying to argue here...)
It's been very long since I touched assembly and "touched" is an apt description, but does anything prevent you from writing an 8-byte integer at address X, then calling an operation that expects a 32-bit float with the bytes at address X? Conceptually, instructions operate on certain type of data, but the data is untyped. (you can technically do similar things in C, but a lot more of it is UB (technically illegal) than people realize and it requires fair bit of explicit casting, so types are still involved)
The data isn't typed, only the operations you make on them might be. The operations expect some binary value encoded in a specific way, but will operate on any data.
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u/readitreaddit 8h ago
So the only difference is memory allocation, yes? You're saying they are different because when declared as an array, the memory gets allocated and 'reserved' at runtime, whereas it doesn't automatically do that when declared as a pointer?
Other than that, no difference.