Question

I have one doubt in the following snippet. Actually I am initializing all the array index to zero in following code, but this for loop is going infinitely. I found reason that we are trying to access the 26th index of array, so that value gets initialized to zero again since there is 0 to 25 index. So the for loop is going infinitely. Explain if any one the actual reason behind this stuff.

int array[26];
int i; 
for (i = 0; i <= 26; i++) 
    array[i]= 0;

Answer 1

You have to use i < 26; otherwise you exceed the array bounds.

Due to the layout of the stack on most systems array[26] will point to the memory used for i which results in the loop starting again since you loop body is setting i to 0 instead of an appropriate array element.

Note that you can simply use int array[36] = { 0 }; to create the array with all elements being set to 0.