Learn C the Hard Way: A Clear & Direct Introduction To Modern C Programming

Exercise 15. Pointers, Dreaded Pointers

Pointers are famous mystical creatures in C. I’ll attempt to demystify them by teaching you the vocabulary to deal with them. They actually aren’t that complex, but they’re frequently abused in weird ways that make them hard to use. If you avoid the stupid ways to use pointers, then they’re fairly easy.

To demonstrate pointers in a way that we can talk about them, I’ve written a frivolous program that prints a group of people’s ages in three different ways.

ex15.c

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 1   #include <stdio.h>  2  3   int main(int argc, char *argv[])  4   {  5       // create two arrays we care about  6       int ages[] = { 23, 43, 12, 89, 2 };  7       char *names[] = {  8           "Alan", "Frank" ...