In a way, passing an array as argument always loses a dimension. The reason behind is that, for historical reasons, arrays cannot be directly copied, and thus what is really passed is a pointer. This is a common source of errors for novice programmers.
atomic number represents the protons in atom. As a example hydrogen has one proton and atomic number is 1.
Atomic number describes the number of protons in one atom of that element. For example, an atom of oxygen contains 8 protons. Elements are listed in order of increasing atomic number from left to right. Each row of the periodic table is called a period and each column of the periodic table is called a group (or family).