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.
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