Programming in C, Third Edition

Chapter 11. Pointers

IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU EXAMINE one of the most sophisticated features of the C programming language: pointers. In fact, the power and flexibility that C provides in dealing with pointers serve to set it apart from many other programming languages. Pointers enable you to effectively represent complex data structures, to change values passed as arguments to functions, to work with memory that has been allocated “dynamically” (see Chapter 17, “Miscellaneous and Advanced Features”), and to more concisely and efficiently deal with arrays.

To understand the way in which pointers operate, it is first necessary to understand the concept of indirection. You are familiar with this concept from your everyday life. For example, suppose you ...