Question

I'm a new learner of C language. Can someone help me understand some concepts?

What's the use of Pointers in C?

Answer 1

Pointers have many uses in C. They're required for some library functions. A pointer is the address that a value is stored at.

You'll frequently see an asterick in front of a pointer's name. That derefences the pointer. In English, it returns the value stored at the address that the pointer points to.

An ampersand preceding a variable's name returns the variable's address instead of it's value

int var;
int *pointer;

var = 2;
pointer = &var; /* assign var's address to pointer */
printf( "%d\n", pointer ); /* prints 2 */
printf( "%d\n", &var ); /* prints 2 */
if( var == *pointer ) /* is true. The asterick gets the value pointer points to */