Question

I have some difficulties grasping some concepts. Grateful for help.

Let’s say you have the following piece of code:

int *intPtr;   // creates a pointer
int count = 10; // initiates an intiger variable
intptr = &count; // ??

The & operator gives the address to a variable, in this case the integer count. The address is then assigned to the intptr. My question is: Why is intptr = count; not sufficient. I know that count is a variable and intptr is a pointer, but isn´t a variable also just referring to some place in memory?

Hans

Answer 1

count refers to the VALUE of the variable. You don’t want to assign the value of count to intptr, you want to assign the address of count. Thus the & operator is used.

If you do intptr = count, you’d be pointing to memory address 10 in this case, which is sure to be in system memory, not your application memory and you’d crash.