recursive 2D arrays

Consider the recursive function header:


void matrixfunc( int a[5][5])

I would like to be able to pass the array a with the dimension constants 5 and 5 as variables rather than constants, similiar to:

void matrixfunc( int a[size]a[size] )

where size will be change within matrixfunc itself. the line of code size = size - 1 will occur somewhere within the function in order to decrease the size of the array.


Is there some kind of fix that allows me to pass 2 D arrays without the size of the array being a constant.


Ultimately, I would like to use void matrixfunc( int a[][]) in my recursion, but I know already that i am unable to do this.

>Is there some kind of fix that allows me to pass 2 D arrays
>without the size of the array being a constant.
Yes, you can pass the array as a pointer to a pointer and define the size for the compiler manually in the function. You *really* don't want to do this though, take my word for it. The best option in this case would be to wrap the array in a struct and pass the struct. That way you don't have to worry about the size of the array while avoiding the freaky notation of passing multidimensional arrays.

-Prelude

I'm assuming that the initial call to this function will always start with arrays of the same size.

Code:

#define SIZE 5
void foo ( int arr[SIZE][SIZE], int size ) {
    int r, c;
    if ( size == 0 ) return;
    for ( r = 0 ; r < size ; r++ ) {
        for ( c = 0 ; c < size ; c++ ) {
            foo( arr, size-1 );
        }
    }
}

int main() {
    int a[SIZE][SIZE];
    foo( a, SIZE );
    return 0;
}

Each recursive call to foo 'removes' the last row and last column from being processed.
The array is passed as a pointer, so all you're doing is just using less of the memory you're pointing at each time around.

If you want to shrink the array to some corner other than [0][0], then that's easy enough to achieve with a few extra parameters to define the effective bounds of the array.