What is pointers in c language

A pointer variable is therefore nothing but a variable which holds an address of some other variable. And the value of a pointer variable gets stored in another memory location. In the next tutorial we will learn syntax of pointers, how to declare and define a pointer, and using a pointer.

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Advanced Data Structure. Operating System. Computer Network. The students will get to learn more about the world of programming in these free classes which will definitely help them in making a wise career choice in the future. To use pointers in C, we must understand below two operators. The address of x is assigned to ptr. This is also called Dereferencing. Note : Pointers contain addresses.

Adding two addresses makes no sense, because there is no idea what it would point to. Subtracting two addresses lets you compute the offset between these two addresses. The value of this pointer constant is the address of the first element. Pointers and Multidimensional Arrays Consider pointer notation for the two-dimensional numeric arrays. If you like GeeksforGeeks and would like to contribute, you can also write an article using write.

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In most of the operating systems, programs are not permitted to access memory at address 0 because that memory is reserved by the operating system.

However, the memory address 0 has special significance; it signals that the pointer is not intended to point to an accessible memory location. But by convention, if a pointer contains the null zero value, it is assumed to point to nothing. Pointers have many but easy concepts and they are very important to C programming. Passing an argument by reference or by address enable the passed argument to be changed in the calling function by the called function.

C allows a function to return a pointer to the local variable, static variable, and dynamically allocated memory as well. C - Pointers Advertisements. Previous Page. Next Page. Live Demo.