I'm sorry if I didn't pick a descriptive or concise name. A lot of questions sound similar, but I haven't been able to find what I'm looking for. What I want to do is store a 2D array of pointers somewhere and assign a variable in some object to that array to be able to access it. Here's some example code that has the same compile error I'm getting with a bigger project. #include <iostream> using namespace std; struct X{ float * b[8][8]; X(){ *(b[1][5]) = 1; cout << *(b[1][5]) << endl; } void Set(float * c[8][8]){ b = c; cout << *(b[1][5]) << endl; } }; main(){ float * a[8][8]; *(a[1][5]) = 2; X obj; obj.Set(a); } What I want to happen in this code is that an X object starts with its own 2D array, whose value pointed to by b[1][5] should be printed as "1". Then the main method's 2D array, a, is passed to the object's Set() method and assigned to its array variable. The value pointed to by b[1][5] should then be printed as "2". However, I can't figure out what type the Set() parameter, c, should be. I get error: incompatible types in assignment of ‘float* (*)[8]’ to ‘float* [8][8]’ when I try to compile. As for why I want to do this, I'm trying to use an array of pointers to objects, not floats, but it's the same error.