Question

Yesterday while I was coding in C, my friend asked me pointing to a variable is it pointer or a variable ? I stucked up for a while. I didnt find an aswer to it , I just have to go back and search it and tell him.But I was thinking is there any function to differentiate them.
Can we differentiate a variable against a pointer variable

int a;
sizeof(a); // gives 2 bytes
int *b;
sizeof(b); // gives 2 bytes
// if we use sizeof() we get same answer and we cant say which is pointer
// and which is a variable

Is there a way to find out a variable is a normal variable or a pointer? I mean can someone say that it is a pointer or a variable after looking at your variable that you have declared at the beginning and then going down 1000 lines of your code?

After the comment
I wanted to say explicitly it’s a 16 bit system architecture.

Answer 1

If you’d like to be able to tell whether a variable is a pointer or not when you see it in the source code, but without going back to look at the declaration, a common approach is to indicate it in the way you name your variables. For example, you might put a ‘p’ at the beginning of the names of pointers:

int *pValue; /* starts with 'p' for 'pointer' */
int iOther;  /* 'i' for 'integer' */

…or even:

int *piSomething; /* 'pi' for 'Pointer to Integer' */

This makes it easy to tell the types when you see the variable in your code. Some people use quite a range of prefixes, to distinguish quite a range of types.

Try looking up “Hungarian notation” for examples.