Which feature of C do beginners find most difficult to understand? The answer is easy: pointers. Other languages have pointers but few use them so frequently as C does. And why not? It is C’s clever use of pointers that makes it the excellent language it is.
The difficulty beginners have with pointers has much to do with C’s pointer terminology than the actual concept. For instance, when a C programmer says that a certain variable is a “pointer”, what does that mean? It is hard to see how a variable can point to something, or in a certain direction.
It is hard to get a grip on pointers just by listening to programmer’s jargon. In our discussion of C pointers, therefore, we will try to avoid this difficulty by explaining pointers in terms of programming concepts we already understand. The first thing we want to do is explain the rationale of C’s pointer notation
It is hard to get a grip on pointers just by listening to programmer’s jargon. In our discussion of C pointers, therefore, we will try to avoid this difficulty by explaining pointers in terms of programming concepts we already understand. The first thing we want to do is explain the rationale of C’s pointer notation
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