Subroutine return types

Pointers also find a valuable place as return types of subroutines. For instance, the previous example of dynamically creating an array of a specific size could be put into a subroutine as follows.

#include <stdio.h>
int *create_array(int);
int main(void) {
  int *scores, n, i;
  printf("How many scores? ");
  scanf("%d", &n);
  scores = create_array(n);
  for(i=0; i<n; i++) {
    printf("scores[%d] = %d\n", i, scores[i]);
  }
  free(scores);
  return 0;
}
int *create_array(int n) {
  int i, *p;
  p = (int *) malloc(n * sizeof(int));
  for(i=0; i<n; i++) {
    p[i] = i;
  }
  return p;
}