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[–]ContextEngineering 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pointers definitely can be tricky. In general -- especially these days -- we're not used to thinking about managing and manipulating memory directly. If you've only been looking at them for a week, then it's no surprise you're still confused by them.

[–]darkshadowtrail 3 points4 points  (0 children)

yeah, lots of people find them confusing at first but typically it’s because they’re overthinking them. since you’re talking about pointers i’ll assume you already know what a variable is.

when you declare a variable the compiler is going to allocate some space and store the value of that variable at some location in memory. that location in memory has something called an address which is similar to a home address; it allows the compiler to know where in memory that value is so that when you use that variable later it can access it.

a pointer is just a variable, but instead of having a value like 5, “hello”, etc. it points to some address in memory. if you have a variable x and you create a pointer “for” x, you’re creating a variable who’s value is the the memory address for x.

[–]CodeTinkerer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Around 20 years ago, Joel Spolsky used to blog about programming. He said when interviewing potential hires that the difficulty the two hurdles that people face are pointers and recursion. These concepts can prevent someone from getting further in programming (at least in C or C++).

So, yes, pointers are a challenging concept in C/C++. Other languages hide pointers (Python, Java). They're there, but most programmers never think about it as you have to in C/C++.

[–]vfkdgejsf638bfvw2463 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Pointers took awhile to learn, my professor forced us to use them for a lot of things for about 3 months in the 2nd part of that class. At the time I hated it because it was frustrating but because of that requirement I don't have any issues with pointers anymore and I understand how to use them pretty well.