Pauline,
Yes, I think that's right...just as Stuart, Don, and Richard originally surmised. The brackets after the type mean that every identifier which follows will refer to an array of that type. Putting additional [] after an identifier in this case makes it an array of arrays (...of array, as in the case of k!) of that type.
I agree that the indexing gets to be nightmarish, but I also happen to be a bit fond of multi-dimensional arrays (or arrays of arrays) -- I'm funny that way!
Chris