C Programming - Pointers - Discussion

Can you please explain pointer is used to store address of that variable or address of another variable?

Can somebody please give some effective answer as to why option B is wrong Because a pointer can also store address of an instruction viz. Function pointer. So they why B is considered wrong ?

Your answer is confusing because pointers can ALSO store things that are not variables.

A variable is something that has a type, value, and a symbolic name.

- Pointer to a string constant. char *p = "Hello";
Note that a string constant does not have a name. This is not a pointer to a variable.

- Pointer to dynamic memory. int *p = (int *) malloc(10);
Note that the memory dynamically allocated is mutable but it is not a variable because it has no name.

What about a pointer to a function?

Can anybody tell why option B is not correct?

Pointer is not a variable because variable is used to store the values but pointer is used to store the address of variable.

So pointer is a operator which is used to store the address of another variable.

It stores the address of the variable how?

Hello friends, I just want to discuss few points about the pointer:

(1) A pointer is a variable of specific type, which is capable of holding the address of another variable of the same type.

(2) It is most powerful concept of c/c++, which allows us to manipulate the contents of memory by their addresses.

(3) You can sort the set of strings by using only single double pointer variable in your source program, try to do it, if you never tried. It will help you to have the good knowledge of pointer.

Dudes one doubt is arise to me. Pointer is one of the data type know? Then how will we tell option C is right?

The correct definition of a pointer is:

Pointer is a variable that stores logical address of an another variable.

We should always specify what type of address we are talking about.

As there are two types of addresses that are:

1: Physical addresses.
2: Logical addresses.

A pointer is a variable of specific type, whose value is address of another variable of its type. The variable can be of any built-in type or any user defined type.

We should have the good knowledge of pointers as it provides a good way of handling dynamic data structures like linked list, stack, queue etc. We use indirection operator (*) in front of variable name for declaring pointer variable.

Eg: int *iptr; char *cptr;