this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Why use pointers? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hey all, teaching myself CPP through a few books (and a little bit of CS in general through CS50) and hit a road block.

I understand what pointers are, and understand they’re a big part of programming. My question is why?

What do you use pointers for? Why is forwarding to a new memory address preferable to just changing the variable/replacing what’s already at the memory address or at a new one? Is it because new data could exceed the size of that address already allocated?

Thanks in advance!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A really simple way you can look at pointers is like this: every time you want to see my house, I could rebuild a complete copy of my house for you, but wouldn’t it be easier if I could give you a note with my house’s address so you could just visit it there?

In the second example, the note is an analogy for a pointer.