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.
The atomic number of an element is equal to the number of protons in the nucleus of its atom. The atomic number is also known as proton number of the element. Further, in an atom, number of protons is equal to the number of electrons. Hence, atomic number is also equal to the number of electrons in an atom of the element. Thus,