Quote Originally Posted by quzah View Post
If there's a box on the shelf, and I say "Without moving, or saying anything, where's the box?" What do you do? Point to it. Pointer is the perfect name, because that's all it actually does. It simply points to where something is in memory.

"Where's this variable located?" *points*


Quzah.

what if I said "wheres minnesota?" Just kidding, but really, my point is (no pun intended) that for a beginner who knows nothing about the concept of passing information by value or by address, I would think a simple explaination that a "pointer" is nothing more than the address where a variable is stored. That makes sense to me, but so many books and 'tutorials' and whatever do a horrible job of explaining what a pointer is. They try to show you code, etc etc..

I just wish that when I first started working with C, someone had just said "Ok, a pointer is simply a memory address." Ok, thats simple. So, I'm passing an address. Awesome. I love the concept of pointers, just not the explaination of them.