Sun Studio 12: C User's Guide

3.8.1 Array and Pointer References

Part of the aliasing problem is that the C language can define array referencing and definition through pointer arithmetic. In order for the compiler to effectively parallelize loops, either automatically or explicitly with pragmas, all data that is laid out as an array must be referenced using C array reference syntax and not pointers. If pointer syntax is used, the compiler cannot determine the relationship of the data between different iterations of a loop. Thus it will be conservative and not parallelize the loop.