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simple project to help me understand pointers.

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simple project to help me understand pointers.

Aug 16th, 2007

Hey guys, I "understand" pointers. But I do not understand how I could actually put them to use. If you could give me a few example programs of how they would be used, then I could try to make the programs. I don't want the code, just the logic behind the program. I don't someone to just hand me over the answer, it will be much more rewarding if I can figure it out on my own.

Thanks,

Joe

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Re: simple project to help me understand pointers.

Aug 16th, 2007

There are millions of examples because they are frequently used in every-day applications. But a simple introduction might be to write a function that sets all the bytes of a character array to 0. Function prototype might be

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void clear_array(char* array, int size);
void clear_array(char* array, int size);

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Re: simple project to help me understand pointers.

Aug 18th, 2007

Sample code

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#include <iostream>
 
using namespace std;
 
int main()
{ 
  int x;            // A normal integer
  int *p;           // A pointer to an integer
 
  p = &x;           // Read it, "assign the address of x to p"
  cin>> x;          // Put a value in x, we could also use *p here
  cin.ignore();
  cout<< *p <<"\n"; // Note the use of the * to get the value
  cin.get();
}
#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

int main()
{ 
  int x;            // A normal integer
  int *p;           // A pointer to an integer

  p = &x;           // Read it, "assign the address of x to p"
  cin>> x;          // Put a value in x, we could also use *p here
  cin.ignore();
  cout<< *p <<"\n"; // Note the use of the * to get the value
  cin.get();
}