Hey all, teaching myself CPP through a few books (and a little bit of CS in general through CS50) and hit a road block.
I understand what pointers are, and understand they’re a big part of programming. My question is why?
What do you use pointers for? Why is forwarding to a new memory address preferable to just changing the variable/replacing what’s already at the memory address or at a new one? Is it because new data could exceed the size of that address already allocated?
Thanks in advance!
There are things you’ll want to do that will eventually require pointers. For example, as soon as you want a type that contains a reference that could be rebound, you need a pointer.
If you want to implement polymorphism you’ll need pointers. If you instead want type erasure, you’ll need pointers to implement your type erasure container.
Sure it’s possible to implement a lot without pointers, but the code will be harder to write and will probably be slower.