Pointers এর ব্যবহার ও তার প্রয়োজনীতা

Submitted by administrator on Mon, 01/02/2012 - 15:48

Chapter 11 - An Introduction to Pointers

 

You've learned about many important C data types, operators, functions, and loops in the last 10 hours. In this lesson you'll learn about one of the most important and powerful features in C: pointers. The topics covered in this chapter are

    Pointer variables
    Memory addresses
    The concept of indirection
    Declaring a pointer
    The address-of operator
    The dereference operator




Summary

In this lesson you've learned the following:

  •     A pointer is a variable whose value is used to point to another variable.
  •     A variable declared in C has two values: the left value and the right value.
  •     The left value of a variable is the address; the right value is the content of the variable.
  •     The address-of operator (&) can be used to obtain the left value (address) of a variable.
  •     The asterisk (*) in a pointer declaration tells the compiler that the variable is a pointer variable.
  •     The dereference operator (*) is a unary operator; as such, it requires only one operand.
  •     The *ptr_name expression returns the value pointed to by the pointer variable ptr_name, where ptr_name can be any valid variable name in C.
  •     If the right value of a pointer variable is 0, the pointer is a null pointer. A null pointer cannot point to valid data.
  •     You can update the value of a variable referred by a pointer variable.
  •     Several pointers can point to the same location of a variable in the memory.


 

Related Items

The #define and #undef Directives

The #define and #undef Directives

The #define directive is the most common preprocessor directive, which tells the preprocessor to replace every occurrence of a particular character string (that is, a macro name) with a specified value (that is, a macro body).

The C Preprocessor Versus the Compiler

The C Preprocessor Versus the Compiler

One important thing you need to remember is that the C preprocessor is not part of the C compiler.

What Is the C Preprocessor?

If there is a constant appearing in several places in your program, it's a good idea to associate a symbolic name to the constant, and then use the symbolic name to replace the constant throughout the program. There are two advantages to doing so. First, your program will be more readable.

Exercises : Answer the following Question

To help solidify your understanding of this hour's lesson, you are encouraged to answer the quiz questions and finish the exercises provided in the Workshop before you move to the next lesson.

Question and Answer

    Q Why is random access to a disk file necessary?