POINTERS

A pointer in C is the address of something. It is a rare case indeed when we care what the specific address itself is, but pointers are a quite common way to get at the contents of something. The unary operator ‘&’ is used to produce the address of an object, if it has one. Thus

int a, b;

b = &a;

puts the address of a into b We can’t do much with it except print it or pass it to some other routine, because we haven’t given b the right kind of declaration. But if we declare that b is indeed a pointer to an integer, we’re in good shape:

int a, *b, c;

b = &a;

c = *b;

b contains the address of a and ‘c = *b’ means to use the value in b as an address, i.e., as a pointer. The effect is that we get back the contents of a, albeit rather indirectly. (It’s always the case that ‘*&x’ is thesame as x if x has an address.)

The most frequent use of pointers in C is for walking efficiently along arrays. In fact, in the implementation of an array, the array name represents the address of the zeroth element of the array, so you can’t use it on the left side of an expression. (You can’t change the address of something by assigning to it.) If we say

char *y;

char x[100];

y is of type pointer to character (although it doesn’t yet point anywhere). We can make y point to an element of x by either of

y = &x[0];

y = x;

Since x is the address of x[0] this is legal and consistent.

Now ‘*y’ gives x[0] More importantly,

*(y+1) gives x[1]

*(y+i) gives x[i]

and the sequence

y = &x[0];

y++;

leaves y pointing at x[1]
Let’s use pointers in a function length that computes how long a character array is. Remember that by convention all character arrays are terminated with a ‘\0’. (And if they aren’t, this program will blow up inevitably.) The old way:

length(s)

char s[ ]; 

{

int n;

for( n=0; s[n] != ′\0′; )

n++;

return(n);

}

Rewriting with pointers gives

length(s)

char *s; {

int n;

for( n=0; *s != ′\0′; s++ )

n++;

return(n);

}

You can now see why we have to say what kind of thing s points to _ if we’re to increment it with s++ we have to increment it by the right amount.The pointer version is more efficient (this is almost always true) but even more compact is

for( n=0; *s++ != ′\0′; n++ );

The ‘*s’ returns a character; the ‘++’ increments the pointer so we’ll get the next character next time around.As you can see, as we make things more efficient, we also make them less clear. But ‘*s++’ is an idiom so common that you have to know it.Going a step further, here’s our function strcopy that copies a character array s to another t.

strcopy(s,t)

char *s, *t; {

while(*t++ = *s++);

}

We have omitted the test against ‘\0’, because ‘\0’ is identically zero; you will often see the code this way.(You must have a space after the ‘=’)
For arguments to a function, and there only, the declarations

char s[ ];

char *s;

are equivalent _ a pointer to a type, or an array of unspecified size of that type, are the same thing.If this all seems mysterious, copy these forms until they become second nature. You don’t often need anything more complicated.

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