 the number of strings pointed to by the elements of the array), as the size of an (outmost) array is otherwise lost when it is passed to a function and converted to a pointer.Thus, codice_8 is a pointer to the 0th element of an array of pointers to codice_6, codice_17, which in turn is a pointer to codice_18, a character (precisely, the 0th character of the first argument string, which by convention is the name of the program).In BCPL, an ancestor of C, the equivalent operator was represented using an exclamation mark.