In 1955, Soviet Ukrainian computer scientist Kateryna Yushchenko invented Address that made possible indirect … See more

In computer science, a pointer is a kind of reference.
A data primitive (or just primitive) is any datum that can be read from or written to computer memory using one memory access (for … See more

Pointers are a very thin abstraction on top of the addressing capabilities provided by most modern architectures. In the simplest scheme, an address, or a numeric index, is assigned to each unit of memory in the system, wh… See more

Pointers are directly supported without restrictions in languages such as PL/I, C, C++, Pascal, FreeBASIC, and implicitly in most assembly languages. They are primarily used for constructing references, which in tur… See more

In many languages, pointers have the additional restriction that the object they point to has a specific type. For example, a pointer may be declared to point to an integer; the language will then attempt to prevent th… See more

As a pointer allows a program to attempt to access an object that may not be defined, pointers can be the origin of a variety of programming errors. However, the usefulness of pointers is so great that it can be difficult t… See more

A null pointer has a value reserved for indicating that the pointer does not refer to a valid object. Null pointers are routinely used to represent conditions such as the end of a list of unknown length or the failure to perform … See more