this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Why use pointers? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/cpp
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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!

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[–] gracicot 8 points 1 year ago

There are things you'll want to do that will eventually require pointers. For example, as soon as you want a type that contains a reference that could be rebound, you need a pointer.

If you want to implement polymorphism you'll need pointers. If you instead want type erasure, you'll need pointers to implement your type erasure container.

Sure it's possible to implement a lot without pointers, but the code will be harder to write and will probably be slower.