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.
What is an atomic number? The atomic number is the number of protons in the nucleus of an atom, according to M.J. Farabee, author of Chemistry 1: Atoms and Molecules. The number of protons define the identity of an element, and it determines how many electrons surround the nucleus.