real noob question

[newatthis]

hi am new at c++ and am trying my best to learn but am having a little trouble understand one aspect that has been repeated in many text books all with very vague explanations.

i am hoping someone can clear some of this up for me.

my question is in regards to arrays and vectors.

i understand that c++ counts from 0+ and not the natural numbers 1+

so an array of test(23) would be in the range 0-22?

this part i understand, however the text book's i have makes use of terms like test.size() -1 to retrieve the last element of an array, which i am having trouble understand.

anyone able to do a simple example to make it clearer?

thank you in advance

[Banfa]

If you have an array with 20 elements

int test[20];

Then (as you say) the indexes for those elements are 0 - 19 inclusive, and you will find that there are 20 numbers in that range.

 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  
 5,  6,  7,  8,  9,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14
15, 16, 17, 18, 19
 

So the array has 20 entries and the index of it's top entry is 19.

If you get the number of elements in the array by using test.size() if it's a class or (sizeof test/sizeof test[0]) if it's a simple array then you will always be able to access the last element of the array using size - 1.

This is true for any size array, an array of 1000 entries will have indexes numbered 0 - 999 inclusive, the last index = size - 1.

[newatthis]

If you have an array with 20 elements

int test[20];

Then (as you say) the indexes for those elements are 0 - 19 inclusive, and you will find that there are 20 numbers in that range.

 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  
 5,  6,  7,  8,  9,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14
15, 16, 17, 18, 19
 

So the array has 20 entries and the index of it's top entry is 19.

If you get the number of elements in the array by using test.size() if it's a class or (sizeof test/sizeof test[0]) if it's a simple array then you will always be able to access the last element of the array using size - 1.

This is true for any size array, an array of 1000 entries will have indexes numbered 0 - 999 inclusive, the last index = size - 1.

i see i think i am getting a clearer picture now

std::vector<double> test(10);
 

would be an array with 10 elements, indexed from 0-9

so if one were to perform the action

 test.size() 

it would return an integer value of the size of the array which in the above example would be 10

we can therefore use the size() -1 to access the last index?

please correct me if i am wrong

[Banfa]

please correct me if i am wrong

I can't because you are completely right :D