Memory Space

This is fundamental. Stephen Jones really helped clarify this.

From PMPP book:

MEMORY SPACE Memory space is a simplified view of how a processor accesses its memory in modern computers. It is usually associated with each running application. The data to be processed by an application and instructions executed for the application are stored in locations in its memory space. Typically, each location can accommodate a byte and has an address. Variables that require multiple bytes—4 bytes for float and 8 bytes for double—are stored in consecutive byte locations. The processor generates the starting address (address of the starting byte location) and the number of bytes needed when accessing a data value from the memory space. The locations in a memory space are similar to phones in a telephone system where everyone has a unique phone number. Most modern computers have at least 4G byte-sized locations, where each G is 1,073,741,824 (230). All locations are labeled with an address ranging from 0 to the largest number. Every location has only one address; thus, we say that the memory space has a “flat” organization. As a result, all multidimensional arrays are ultimately “flattened” into equivalent one-dimensional arrays. Whereas a C programmer can use a multidimensional syntax to access an element of a multidimensional array, the compiler translates these accesses into a base pointer that points to the initial element of the array, along with an offset calculated from these multidimensional indexes.