Once you ‘get’ pointers they are very easy to use. I think I always got them easily because long ago I used to do game programming in assembly language. When you are accessing blocks of ram indirectly through registers in assembly, then the concept of a pointer in C/C++ comes fairly naturally.

But really, all a pointer is, is a variable that holds an address. That address can be one of several things. It could be to a string of characters, an int or float variable, a struct, an array. In fact it can be anything that can exist in memory.

There are some limitations. It’s not good practice to use a pointer to access the underlying binary of your program, assuming that you can locate it. Plus chances are that code will be in memory that you cannot write to. Data however will let you write to it and pointers make your program far more flexible than without.

Tutorial six on pointers has been published. I’ll publish another one to follow it.