【C】Pointer (2) Explanation About Pointer in Nikkei Software

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Nikkei Software 2004 June.

I like this book (magazine) because it summarizes some essences of C language. I have been keeping this book more than 10 years.

However, I have to say this, this book is also wrong. Below is described on Page 59.

First, you should understand that “Pointer is a variable which stores the address of a variable”.

ref: p59 Nikkei Software 2004 June

It’s wrong, but surprisingly lots of books and web resources explain this way.

The reason why I think it’s wrong is Pointer can store not only an address of a variable , but also a start address of string constant, a structure, a union, a function and others. We also have pointers named, file pointers and null pointers.

I understand pointer as below.

Pointer is a mechanism to access “a variety of things” which exist in the program written in C language.

Next time, I will explain what is described above.

That’s all for this time.