why pointers???????????
@thedeathknight (335)
India
September 1, 2009 9:16am CST
Hello friends.
I just want to know that why do we need to study pointers in C, though many programs which needs pointer manipulation can be achieved without them as well. Also all high level languages like C++ an java use inbuilt pointer manipulation and doesn't want the programmers to engaged with all these stuffs. Them why for pointers are necessary?Also various companies during interviews and test on C generally asks questions on pointers. WHY????????????Thanks for your response in advance.
Happy MyLotting.
1 person likes this
5 responses
@Debs_place (10520)
• United States
2 Sep 09
I have done very little Java 0r C or C++ programming but I think after working with languages like assembler, you find that using and understanding pointers requires fairly in depth knowledge and understanding of the language and the way computers work and how data is stored and processed in memory.
If the interviewer feels that you are comfortable discussing pointers than you will be able to contribute. (personal theory)
2 people like this
@thedeathknight (335)
• India
2 Sep 09
Yes you are right my friend, but if a programmer does not want to go inside the field of development of compilers, operating system, file management system etc ie stuffs close to assembly language programming then he/she don't want to learn all these.
Thanks for your response.
@ferdzNK (3211)
• Philippines
2 Sep 09
I can only relate this in vb for which I'm more familiar with. There will always come a time when we need to interact with external programs, maybe to enhance processing speed or functions that would be too tedious for us to code ourselves.
One good example of this is in processing images, supposed you want to display a PNG in your application. We would certainly need here a sort of png.dll that require most of the time passing arguments by reference, in C this is termed as pointers. It would be a waste of system resource to make copy of the image always specially for very large one. So we only have one copy and the pointer to it is what we actually pass to an external program for processing. Hope this somehow clears something.
1 person likes this
@thedeathknight (335)
• India
2 Sep 09
Thanks for your response and very good example on the topic, but I would like to say that even now there will be new APIs available in VB that will do that automatically and also all of the newer languages supports that kind of functionality will their respective APIs then WHY?????????
Keep myLotting.
@shanmukhsista (84)
• India
26 Oct 09
You may not require pointers at the basic level of any programming language but as you go deeper into the concepts pointers play a very important role in any program. These concepts include data structures and higher level programs ..So understanding the basic concepts of pointers is necessary
@fglswh (66)
• China
20 Sep 09
If C language does not have pointer feature, it's application will decreased heavily. I am a linux c programer, and write device driver in C language. It is very important to understanding C pointer,especially in almost all hardware related operation, memory management etc. besides pointer, C cannot accomplish all this task.
1 person likes this
@types10000 (32)
•
20 Oct 11
the reason relates to the greater level of memory management offered by C compared to higher level languages (and it's continued effort to get as close to assembly as possible).
Also whilst java does manage pointers for you, c++ does not.
"C's memory management gives you enough rope to hang yourself, in c++ you also get the tree object"
