Pointers
Pointers have long been a source of trouble for beginners and experts alike. It takes a while for beginners to get used to pointers, and they are a fertile source of bugs in even professionals' programs. The pointer is an animal that is never entirely tamed, and it should be treated with respect. Pointers are no longer as crucial in basic C++ programming as they were in C, which is why I've delayed talking about them until this chapter. Indeed, Java deliberately eliminated pointers because they are potentially unsafe, although they are still there, disguised as references.
Pointers as References
You can think of memory as a large array of bytes, up to 4GB in length on a 32-bit machine. The address of a variable is the index into that ...
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