Thread: Pointers Help

What are they used for? I know how to use them, but dont quite know what sort of practical uses there are for them.

Dynamic data structures like linked lists and binary trees are best made with pointers. You can use pointers to pass big objects around without worrying about copying them. You can use pointers to get to the hardware directly and work with it. With the STL you can use pointers to avoid code bloat by having containers of pointers instead of objects. There's a lot of practical use for pointers, most of them are harder to see because C++ tries to give you abstractions which hide them.

There are tons of uses for pointers!

Lets say you have a struct or class that is very large. Maybe say, 50 bytes. What if you need to pass this to a function? You may do it like this..

Code:

int myFunction( myClass food )
{
  // .. blah
  return 0;
}

Well this has a lot of overhead. It actually creates a copy of the class to let the function use! So it copies a 50 byte structure or class then if the function changes anything it doesn't effect the original copy! A much better way to do it would be to pass a pointer to the original class..

Code:

int myFunction( myClass *pFood )
{
  // ..blah
  return 0;
}

This way you only put 4bytes for the pointer on the stack and don't waste time with a copy constructor and so on.

Thats just a single example. What if you need to allocate space at run-time to hold information? You might want to use a pointer for that. The more advanced you get the more and more you will use pointers. Lots of the Win32 API functions require you to pass a pointer to a variable into the function and the function will fill in the information for you.

What if you wanted to write your own string class. Well say you wanted to write a function to determine the length of a string. Simple, get a pointer to the character array and walk through it until you find the end of string character. Pointer arithmetic is great.

What about linked lists? Inside a "node" you store a pointer to another node.

Well hopefully that will give you a little idea of a few uses for pointers.

pointers are variables that holds the representation of an address in memory similar to an int that holds the representation of an integer in memory or a char which holds the representation of a character in memory, or whatever. The compiler knows how much memory is being pointed to by the pointer because you declared the pointer with a type name, but the pointer doesn't know how much memory the object uses, just where the memory block for the object starts. Likewise the pointer doesn't know what the value of the oject stored at that location is, although the compiler has kept track of it and can tell you if you dereference the pointer.

I'd say that the most common use of pointers is to "get around" the fact that a function can only retrn one value. With pointers your functin can affect as many variables as you want!