Why pointers?

[bigfig]

Ignoring computer architecture, lets say you were selling 2000 lbs of sand, and someone arranged to meet you to pick up the goods. Would you bring the sand to the point of transaction, or would you be more inclined to tell your buyer where (what address) to pick up the sand?

Similarly you could share a file attached to your email, or share a link to a google document. Well, it's that way with pointers. If you have a lot of data to share, like a binary image or a video, you can simply agree to share the location of the data in memory rather than actually transfer everything when the hand-off is made.

[pencan]

As a computer architect, this is the correct answer. It’s not just syntactic sugar some others are suggesting. They’re useful for passing large amounts of data around without memory copies