C Programming Absolute Beginner's Guide (3rd Edition)

FIGURE 24.1 The variable pAge points to age if pAge holds the address of age.

Warning

Just because you define two variables back to back doesn’t mean that C stores them

back to back in memory. C might store them together, but it also might not.

Warning

Never try to set the address of one type of variable to a pointer variable of a different

type. C lets you assign the address of one type of variable only to a pointer defined

with the same data type.

The isn’t part of a pointer variable’s name. You use the dereferencing operator for several
things, but in the pointer definition, the exists only to tell C that the variable is a pointer, not a
regular variable. The following four statements do exactly the same thing as the previous two
statements. Notice that you don’t use to store the address of a variable in a pointer variable unless
you are also defining the pointer at the same time.

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int age; // Defines a regular integer

int * pAge; // Defines a pointer to an integer

age = 19; //Stores 19 in age

pAge = &age; // Links up the pointer

Using the Dereferencing *

As soon as you link up a pointer to another variable, you can work with the other value by
dereferencing the pointer. Programmers never use an easy word when a hard one will do just as well