Question

As far as I know about data types in C/C++, while declaring a variable, we need to declare its data type, which tells the compiler to reserve the number of bytes in the memory accordingly.

But in the case of pointers, we know that their size is constant (eg. 2 bytes in “Turbo Compiler”), irrespective of the data type of the variable it is pointing to, because the pointer is storing a memory address as an unsigned integer.

My question is, if the pointers are always a constant size in bytes, then what is the need of mentioning the data type while declaring them? Is my understanding about pointers wrong?

Answer 1

The data type is needed when dereferencing the pointer so it knows how much data it should read. For example dereferencing a char pointer should read the next byte from the address it is pointing to while an int pointer should read 2 bytes.