Rupan

Addresses & Pointers

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Everything in a program lives at a specific numeric address in memory.

  • Address-of Operator (&): Gets the memory location of a variable.
  • Pointer (*): A variable that stores a memory address.
  • Dereference Operator (*): Goes to the address stored in a pointer and gets the value.
int x = 42; 
int* ptr = &x; // ptr holds the address of x (e.g., 0x7ffd...)
 
// Accessing
std::cout << ptr;  // Prints the address (0x7ffd...)
std::cout << *ptr; // Prints the value (42)

Pointer Arithmetic

Allows you to use a 1D array to represent higher dimensional (2D, 3D, etc.) data. 3D example:

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