I was just flying over the D specification to get familiar with the language and got confused with something regarding arrays of character strings. It might have been discussed here before, it might have been answered in some other part of the documentation that I haven't reach yet, or I might have a completely wrong understanding of these matters in the first place, so please forgive my ignorance.

On the language reference page for 'Arrays' in section 'Array Declarations' it states that "int[4][3]" creates an array of 3 arrays of 4 ints each. This seems to be different from the C++ programming standard (chapter 2.3.6 Arrays), which states that "int [4][3]" creates an array of 4 arrays with 3 ints each.

I realize that, technically this doesn't matter, as elements always end up on the same address (assuming linear memory layout), and I think the D definition makes more sense. In fact, I always thought it to be like that in C++ as well and never really thought about it - until today. The confusion starts when considering the declaration of arrays of character strings.

In C++, the expression "char[][3]" declares a variable length array of strings with 3 characters each, which can easily be verified using

  char c[][3] =
  {
      { "he" },
      { "ll" },
      { "ow" },
      { "or" },
      { "ld" }
  };

According to the D specification (page 'Expressions', section 'New Expressions') and in accordance with the definition of arrays, the same expression declares an array of 3 strings with variable length.

It seems to me that the treatment of multi-dimensional arrays is different between D and C++. Is this correct, and, if yes, should it be pointed out in the documentation, if not already done?