Introduction to Pointers

Pointers are a special type of variable that instead of holding variable values, they hold memory addresses. They always represent an address of a memory location, or point towards a value at a given address.

This indirect access to values offers many benefits in programming. Understanding how pointers work is essential for tasks like dynamic memory allocation, passing arguments or parameters to a function by reference, etc.

Here's a visual image of how pointers work. The variable var has a value of 5, so it's probably an integer (int), its location in the memory is 0x61ff08, and that's why the value of the pointer pointVar which isn't actually a value, but instead, it's a memory address of where the variable is stored is 0x61ff08. So now, we can say that the pointer pointVar points to the variable var on memory location 0x61ff08 which has a value of 5

•  Variables contain values ​​for the data (direct referencing)
• Pointers contain addresses of variables (indirect referencing)