Arrays versus Pointers
A pointer is a variable which keeps a memory address. This address is the position of another item in memory. A pointer has variable name exactly like any other variable and also has got type which designates what type of variable its elements refer to. For instance, in case one variable has the memory address of another variable, the 1st variable is said to point to the second variable.

Declaring a Pointer

Pointers may be announced as we do normal variables, except for the pointer name has an asterisk before it to show that it's variable which is a pointer. The normal syntax for announcing a pointer is

type* variable_name;

We can put the asterisk near to variable name, but it’s a good programming routine to put the asterisk close type because it shows that the pointer variable points to that kind of variable.

For instance, we wish to announce a pointer that keeps the memory address of an integer variable. The announcement would appear as follows

int* ptr;

There are 2 operators linked with pointers.

1. Address-of operator(&)

This operator is utilized to get the address of a variable. It's a unary operator. Let's see an illustration on the way to utilize this operator. int var = 9; //declare a variable of integer type int* ptr; //declare pointer ptr = &var; //assign the address of var to pointer variable

2. Indirection operator(*)

This operator is utilized to access the contents of the address included in the pointer variable. Next to view the way we utilize this operator, we carry on from above illustration. Assume we wish to print the value in var utilizing ptr we can do this as follows cout