Q: Where do you live? A: At , , . That's a pointer. Now, at that address, there is a building with many floors. Q: On what floor do you live? A: Floor X. That's a pointer. Now, at that address, there are many apartments. Q: What's your apartment's number? A: It's Y. That's a pointer. A program manipulates data. That data is stored somewhere in memory. To access that memory we need a reference to it, that's what variables are. But sometimes, we need to manipulate the location of the memory itself. That's what pointers do, they are variables that contain the location information. Just like Amazon will ask for your house address so that it can deliver your package, you don't send your house to Amazon, only its location information. An index in an array is a pointer. An offset on the stack is a pointer. A virtual 64-bits address is a pointer. etc. More on reddit.com

Once you've read the few lines about pointers, it's a matter of practice. You won't learn more until you have an precise question. So here is a simple exercice: Create a main function that declares an int. From this function, call another function (let's call it 'change') that changes this int. But this function must not return antyhing. In the change function: receive the int adds 3 to it print the value of the received int -returns nothing In the main function: declare an int, initialize it at, say, 2. call the 'change' function with this int. print the address of the int. print the value of the int. Now use an int pointer instead. More on reddit.com

Try using them for implementing a simple bubble sort algorithm, Then try doing the same without pointers. You'll know the difference. More on reddit.com

Hi. My undergraduate program used C++ and later on used C. In graduate school, I used mostly Java. As a graduate instructor and now a professor, I've taught courses in C++, Java, and Python.

Personally, I don't like the wording of your question. It conveys the idea that C pointers are intuitive.

Regardless of the language I am teaching, this is the first assignment:

Prompt the user to enter their name at the keyboard. Print on the screen "Hello, " followed by the user's name.

I estimate about 5-10% of a freshman class drops after this assignment. They can't do it. Programming is already so complicated that a simple 1 prompt echo program is over their heads. We haven't even discussed data manipulation at this point.

The concept of a location of memory referencing another location in memory is so abstract that it prevents people from progressing. Why on earth would I ever want to referencing a memory location indirectly when we're capable of solving every problem without it? The students throw their hands up in disgust and walk away. Sure, there exists some optimizations that dramatically speed up the program, but shouldn't the compiler do this work for me? I just want to pass my array to that function. I don't care how it happens as long it's the same on the inside of the function.

The students believe that the computer should make their lives easier, not harder. The pointer is the antithesis of this belief.

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