Question

Recently I came across this video on Programming Paradigms and the prof. used terms like Asterisks, Star, and Ampersand.

This was what how he used those operators:

int i = 37;
float f = *(float*)&i;

And how he voiced line 2 while writing it:

Float “f” equals asterisk float star, ampersand of i

I understand what asterisk and ampersand mean, but what is the significance of using star here? Is it synonymous to asterisk?

Answer 1

The * after the float is used to form a type. Very often when referring to a pointer type in words people will say “star” after the type rather “pointer”, eg. “malloc returns a void star”. I’ve never heard anyone use “asterisk” to refer to a type.

The * at the start is used to de-reference the pointer thereby accessing the value it points to (interpreted as a float due to the following cast). Again, in my own experience I’ve never heard anyone use “asterisk” here. People just tend to say “de-reference” to describe the operation being performed.

I wouldn’t read too much into it. There are two different contexts here as you rightly spotted and as long as you understand what they mean from a C++ point of view then that’s fine.