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 is the number of protons an atom has. It is characteristic and unique for each element. The atomic mass (also referred to as the atomic weight) is the number of protons and neutrons in an atom.