The ability to manipulate memory and memory locations directly is part of what makes C and C++ so powerful, so dangerous, and so difficult for beginners. C only has pointers, but C++ uses pointers and references that have a nicer syntax and attempt to be
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Pointers and References in C++
The ability to manipulate memory and memory locations directly is part of what makes C and C++ so powerful, so dangerous, and so difficult for beginners. C only has "pointers", but C++ uses pointers and "references" that have a nicer syntax and attempt to be safer. This article will attempt to demystify these concepts in the minds of beginning C/C++ programmers.
This article assumes the reader has a basic understanding of C/C++ including variable declaration, conditionals, loops, functions, and data types. This article will speak more specifically about C++.
Remember, pointers can twist your mind at first and they are a difficult concept to grasp. Often times it is hard to see where they would be useful.
The Basics
The "normal" way of storing information (data) in C++ is using certain predefined types like integers (int), floating point values (float, double), and characters (char). The programmer tells the compiler about the data he wishes to store by giving its type, its name, and possibly an initial value.
None of this should be new or difficult. This is easy, assuming you know the different types, and the best part about it is that the compiler takes care of finding a place to store the variable and we just tell it when we want to know what is "stored" in the variable. But wait! The compiler knows where the variable is stored in memory, it has to. We can get at the address of a variable by using the address of operator, "&" (ampersand).
But why would we care about knowing the address of our variables? The compiler takes care of storing our data for us, right? Yes, and we as humans have very little use of printing out the addresses of variables except for debugging purposes. But we can store an address of a variable into a special data type called a pointer and the compiler takes care of storing our "pointer value" for us. We designate pointers with a data type (int, float...) followed by the * (asterisk) symbol.
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