Question

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Common Uses For Pointers?

I am still learning the basics of C++ but I already know enough to do useful little programs.

I understand the concept of pointers and the examples I see in tutorials make sense to me. However, on the practical level, and being a (former) PHP developer, I am not yet confident to actually use them in my programs.

In fact, so far I have not felt the need to use any pointer. I have my classes and functions and I seem to be doing perfectly fine without using any pointer (let alone pointers to pointers). And I can’t help feeling a bit proud of my little programs.

Still, I am aware that I am missing on one of C++’s most important feature, a double edged one: pointers and memory management can create havoc, seemingly random crashes, hard to find bugs and security holes… but at the same time, properly used, they must allow for clever and efficient programming.

So: do tell me what I am missing by not using pointers.

What are good scenarios where using pointers is a must?
What do they allow you to do that you couldn’t do otherwise?
In which way to they make your programs more efficient?

And what about pointers to pointers???

[Edit: All the various answers are useful. One problem at SO is that we cannot “accept” more than one answer. I often wish I could. Actually, it’s all the answers combined that help to understand better the whole picture. Thanks.]

Answer 1

Pointers are commonly used in C++. Becoming comfortable with them, will help you understand a broader range of code. That said if you can avoid them that is great, however, in time as your programs become more complex, you will likely need them even if only to interface with other libraries.

• Primarily pointers are used to refer to dynamically allocated memory (returned by new).

• They allow functions to take arguments that cannot be copied onto the stack either because they are too big or cannot be copied, such as an object returned by a system call. (I think also stack alignment, can be an issue, but too hazy to be confident.)

• In embedded programing they are used to refer to things like hardware registers, which require that the code write to a very specific address in memory.

• Pointers are also used to access objects through their base class interfaces. That is if I have a class B that is derived from class A class B : public A {}. That is an instance of the object B could be accessed as if it where class A by providing its address to a pointer to class A, ie: A *a = &b_obj;

• It is a C idiom to use pointers as iterators on arrays. This may still be common in older C++ code, but is probably considered a poor cousin to the STL iterator objects.

• If you need to interface with C code, you will invariable need to handle pointers which are used to refer to dynamically allocated objects, as there are no references. C strings are just pointers to an array of characters terminated by the nul ‘\0’ character.

Once you feel comfortable with pointers, pointers to pointers won’t seem so awful. The most obvious example is the argument list to main(). This is typically declared as char *argv[], but I have seen it declared (legally I believe) as char **argv.

The declaration is C style, but it says that I have array of pointers to pointers to char. Which is interpreted as a arbitrary sized array (the size is carried by argc) of C style strings (character arrays terminated by the nul ‘\0’ character).