C pointers vs. Objective-C pointers

Question

I\'m coming from an Objective-C background and am trying to expand my knowledge in C. One thing has me confused, however, and that\'s the difference between pointers in C and O

Answer 1

The thing is that when you create an object, you actually always manipulate it through a pointer assigned to it, hence (NSString *).

Try doing the same thing in C (working with a string), perhaps it becomes clearer:

void myFunction()
{
    char *string = "this is a C string!";
    char **ptr=&string;


    // Prints: "this is a c string"
    printf("ptr points to %s: \n",  *ptr);
}

As you can see, pointers work in exactly the same way as they do in objective-c. Bare in mind that there are very few primitives in objective-c (int is the most obvious one). Most of the time you are creating a pointer of type object X (say NSString), and then allocating a chunk of memory (through [[Object alloc] init]) and assigining the start address of that chunk to your pointer. Exactly the same as we've done in C with our string.