Pointers are aptly named: they "point" to locations in memory. Think of a row of safety deposit boxes of various sizes at a local bank. Each safety deposit box will have a number associated with it so that the teller can quickly look it up. These numbers are like the memory addresses of variables. A pointer in the world of safety deposit boxes would simply be anything that stored the number of another safety deposit box. Perhaps you have a rich uncle who stored valuables in his safety deposit box, but decided to put the real location in another, smaller, safety deposit box that only stored a card with the number of the large box with the real jewelry. The safety deposit box with the card would be storing the location of another box; it would be equivalent to a pointer. In the computer, pointers are just variables that store memory addresses, usually the addresses of other variables.The cool thing is that once you can talk about the address of a variable, you'll then be able to go to that address and retrieve the data stored in it. If you happen to have a huge piece of data that you want to pass into a function, it's a lot easier to pass its location to the function than to copy every element of the data! Moreover, if you need more memory for your program, you can request more memory from the system--how do you get "back" that memory? The system tells you where it is located in memory; that is to say, you get a memory address back. And you need pointers to store the memory address.A note about terms: the word pointer can refer either to a memory address itself, or to a variable that stores a memory address. Usually, the distinction isn't really that important: if you pass a pointer variable into a function, you're passing the value stored in the pointer--the memory address. When I want to talk about a memory address, I'll refer to it as a memory address; when I want a variable that stores a memory address, I'll call it a pointer. When a variable stores the address of another variable, I'll say that it is "pointing to" that variable.
C++
Topic: Pointers
What are pointers? Why should you care?
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