Hey all, teaching myself CPP through a few books (and a little bit of CS in general through CS50) and hit a road block.

I understand what pointers are, and understand they’re a big part of programming. My question is why?

What do you use pointers for? Why is forwarding to a new memory address preferable to just changing the variable/replacing what’s already at the memory address or at a new one? Is it because new data could exceed the size of that address already allocated?

Thanks in advance!

  • @coltorl
    4•1 year ago

    Hi OP, pointers are very powerful. You’ve already seen some responses to your question about why/when to use it, but there’s another cool trick I like to do with pointers. Namely, data hiding with opaque pointers (an application of type erasure). Especially in library code where I don’t want to introduce too many includes in the consuming application, I will hide data and implementation using the pimpl idiom. Another great use case for pointers.

    https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/pimpl