Chapter 9.5, Problem 9.6CP

Program Plan Intro

Pointer:

Pointer, the name itself references the purpose of the pointer. Pointers point to a location in memory.

• Pointer is a special type of variable to store the address of the memory location, which can be accessed later.
• If an asterisk “*” operator is present before the variable, then that variable is referred as pointer variable.
  • It is also called as dereferencing or indirection operator.
• Pointer is just a type of variable that stores the addresses of other variables.
• Using pointers, we can access the address of a variable; the data stored in that variable can be retrieved.

Syntax of pointer variable declaration:

<variable-type> *<variable-name>;

Adding a value to a pointer variable:

When a pointer variable is added it is similar to adding number of time the size of the pointer variable that is stored.

Example:

//declaring a pointer variable

int *a;

//incrementing the pointer value by 1

a++;

In the above snippet the pointer variable is incremented by “1” means, the size of the pointer variable is being increased in terms of their size.

1 * 2 = 2

Therefore, additional 2 bytes will be added to the pointer variable “a” after incrementing it by “1”.