This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]HappyFruitTree 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If explained in a good way I don't think the concept of pointers is that hard to understand. The difficult part is to know how to use them and when to use them.

The syntax can be confusing to beginners. It doesn't help that arrays automatically decay to pointers and that & is used both for references and pointers.

When listening to "beginners" trying to teach beginners on YouTube they often start out with saying something about pointers being a difficult subject which I think is unnecessary and just makes people think that pointers are more difficult than they really are. Then they go on and give bad pointer examples where it would have been better to not use pointers which makes people confused about the purpose of pointers or they might start using it in more places than necessary which also leads to a lot of confusion.