failing like never before

I had a few problems trying to dynamically create and pass a multidimensional array in C++ for my previous programming project. Of course, passing an array by value is rather ridiculous when the array is large, so I had to pass by reference. Now, passing a single dimensional array is really quite simple in C++, you just do the following:

//stuff
int input_cols;
char *char_array_ptr;
//stuff
cout << "cols? ";
cin >> input_a;
char_array_ptr = new char[input_cols];
return char_array_ptr;

And hey, you're done. The same thing could pretty much be done in C by using malloc, instead of new. But as I mentioned, I needed to pass a multidimensional array.