Pointers in C Programming: A Modern Approach to Memory Management, Recursive Data Structures, Strings, and Arrays

© Thomas Mailund 2021

T. MailundPointers in C Programminghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-6927-5_1

1. Introduction

Thomas Mailund¹  

(1)

Aarhus N, Denmark

 

Pointers and memory management are considered among the most challenging issues to deal with in low-level programming languages such as C. It is not that pointers are conceptually difficult to understand, nor is it difficult to comprehend how we can obtain memory from the operating system and how we return the memory again so it can be reused. The difficulty stems from the flexibility with which pointers let us manipulate the entire state of a running program. With pointers, every object anywhere in a program’s memory is available to us—at least in principle. We can change any bit to our heart’s ...