Thread: returning a pointer

I have been asked to write a function called merge that accepts
two pointers and returns a pointer.
So to define this I would write:
??? merge(LISTINTPTR *, LISTINTPTR *);

instead of the ??? what is the return type for a pointer?
like the two pointers that are being passed into the function, the pointer points to the first node of a linked list.

I'm pretty sure that that would give me an error/warning indicating a non recognisable return type.
What I'm asking is a general type like int or char, that is a return type used for pointers.

pointers have no intrinsic type. You have to tell the compiler what type the pointer is to point to. An instance of a struct or class or a typedef are as valid a type as are the primitive types such int, char, etc.

In C lists are not much more than a pointer to a struct that contains (a) data member(s) and a pointer to the type. In C++ lists are frequently elevated to types in and of themselves containing not only the data member(s) and pointer(s) but the functions necesarray to manipulate information contained in the list.