Pointer (Computing)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In computer science, a pointer is a programming language data type whose value refers directly to (or points to) another value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its address. For high-level programming languages, pointers effectively take the place of general purpose registers in low-level languages such as assembly language or machine code, but may be in available memory. A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value at the location a pointer refers to is known as dereferencing the pointer. A pointer is a simple, more concrete implementation of the more abstract reference data type. Several languages support some type of pointer, although some have more restrictions on their use than others. As an analogy, a page number in a book could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number.