My point is that you can't do the same thing with C arrays as with Perl arrays. Of course Perl is written in C so anything you can do in Perl can be done in C, except there may be a more efficent way of handling things in C.
cdarke,
Ok - I can buy that. So your advice then is to choose an Array as my datastructure and to spend my research time on figuring out how to do what I want in C efficiently. This is valid and is actually the way I am leaning.