Everyday Data Structures

A few pointers

Many languages view memory as a series of successive cells, each a certain number of bytes in size and each with a unique address. Pointers are memory management tools, which are really objects that reference, or point to, a memory cell's address. By utilizing pointers, a program can store objects in memory that are themselves larger than a single memory block. Some languages use the * operator to denote the assignment of a pointer. If you use Objective-C, or if you have worked with C/C++, you will already be very familiar with this operator. C#, Java, and Swift developers won't have had too much experience with this operator, but you should be familiarize yourself with how pointers work anyway, and here's why:

When an object in ...