C++ Introduction to Pointers

VARIABLES

A variable is an abstraction of a memory cell. These are named memory locations used to store a value. The address of a variable can be easily obtained by Address-of Operator(&).

 int num;                                                     
 cout<< &num;

POINTERS

Pointer is a powerful mechanism in C++ programming. Pointers are special variables that contains the address of another variable.

A pointer is declared as following:

 int *int_ptr;                                 
 char *char_ptr;                                                float *float_ptr;                                                        

After declaration, we can assign address of variables to a pointer.

 int num=10;                                                 
 int_ptr = &num;                                                               
 char ch='a';                                               
 char_ptr = &ch;                                                      
 float val=3.25;                                           
 float_ptr = &val;                                                        

A fundemental operation on pointers in Dereferencing i.e. referring to the object pointed by that pointer.

 cout<< *int_ptr;    //10                                     
 cout<< *char_ptr;   //a                                      
 cout<< *float_ptr;  //3.5  

Author : Prateek Gupta

Share this

Related Posts