Operations with pointers

At this point, the only operations that work reasonably with pointers are the following:

• Assignment
• Accessing pointer targets
• Limited pointer arithmetic
• The comparison of pointers

We will explore each of these in turn. As we do, we must also consider the NULL special pointer value (the zeroth address), or a null pointer, and the void* special, unspecified pointer type, or a void pointer type.

Assigning pointer values

We have just seen how to assign an address to a pointer variable by using another variable's named location, as follows:

int height;

int width;

int length

int* pDimension;

pDimension = &height;

A diagram of the memory layout for these declarations is given in the Accessing pointer targets section.

We can later reassign pDimension, as follows:

pDimension = &width;

This assigns the address of ...