With arrays, why is it the case that a[5] == 5[a]?

The C standard defines the [] operator as follows:

a[b] == *(a + b)

Therefore a[5] will evaluate to:

*(a + 5)

and 5[a] will evaluate to:

*(5 + a)

a is a pointer to the first element of the array. a[5] is the value that's 5 elements further from a, which is the same as *(a + 5), and from elementary school math we know those are equal (addition is commutative).

Because array access is defined in terms of pointers. a[i] is defined to mean *(a + i), which is commutative.

And, of course

 ("ABCD"[2] == 2["ABCD"]) && (2["ABCD"] == 'C') && ("ABCD"[2] == 'C')

The main reason for this was that back in the 70's when C was designed, computers didn't have much memory (64KB was a lot), so the C compiler didn't do much syntax checking. Hence "X[Y]" was rather blindly translated into "*(X+Y)"

This also explains the "+=" and "++" syntaxes. Everything in the form "A = B + C" had the same compiled form. But, if B was the same object as A, then an assembly level optimization was available. But the compiler wasn't bright enough to recognize it, so the developer had to (A += C). Similarly, if C was 1, a different assembly level optimization was available, and again the developer had to make it explicit, because the compiler didn't recognize it. (More recently compilers do, so those syntaxes are largely unnecessary these days)

One thing no-one seems to have mentioned about Dinah's problem with sizeof:

You can only add an integer to a pointer, you can't add two pointers together. That way when adding a pointer to an integer, or an integer to a pointer, the compiler always knows which bit has a size that needs to be taken into account.

Nice question/answers.

Just want to point out that C pointers and arrays are not the same, although in this case the difference is not essential.

Consider the following declarations:

int a[10];
int* p = a;

In a.out, the symbol a is at an address that's the beginning of the array, and symbol p is at an address where a pointer is stored, and the value of the pointer at that memory location is the beginning of the array.

For pointers in C, we have

a[5] == *(a + 5)

and also

5[a] == *(5 + a)

Hence it is true that a[5] == 5[a].

A little bit of history now. Among other languages, BCPL had a fairly major influence on C's early development. If you declared an array in BCPL with something like:

let V = vec 10

that actually allocated 11 words of memory, not 10. Typically V was the first, and contained the address of the immediately following word. So unlike C, naming V went to that location and picked up the address of the zeroeth element of the array. Therefore array indirection in BCPL, expressed as

let J = V!5

really did have to do J = !(V + 5) (using BCPL syntax) since it was necessary to fetch V to get the base address of the array. Thus V!5 and 5!V were synonymous. As an anecdotal observation, WAFL (Warwick Functional Language) was written in BCPL, and to the best of my memory tended to use the latter syntax rather than the former for accessing the nodes used as data storage. Granted this is from somewhere between 35 and 40 years ago, so my memory is a little rusty. :)

The innovation of dispensing with the extra word of storage and having the compiler insert the base address of the array when it was named came later. According to the C history paper this happened at about the time structures were added to C.

Note that ! in BCPL was both a unary prefix operator and a binary infix operator, in both cases doing indirection. just that the binary form included an addition of the two operands before doing the indirection. Given the word oriented nature of BCPL (and B) this actually made a lot of sense. The restriction of "pointer and integer" was made necessary in C when it gained data types, and sizeof became a thing.

Because C compiler always convert array notation in pointer notation. a[5] = *(a + 5) also 5[a] = *(5 + a) = *(a + 5) So, both are equal.

Because it's useful to avoid confusing nesting.

Would you rather read this:

array[array[head].next].prev

or this:

head[array].next[array].prev

Incidentally, C++ has a similar commutative property for function calls. Rather than writing g(f(x)) as you must in C, you may use member functions to write x.f().g(). Replace f and g with lookup tables and you can write g[f[x]] (functional style) or (x[f])[g] (oop style). The latter gets really nice with structs containing indices: x[xs].y[ys].z[zs]. Using the more common notation that's zs[ys[xs[x].y].z].