Benefits of pointers?

Question

I recently developed an interest in C programming so I got myself a book (K&R) and started studying.

Coming from a University course in Java (basics), pointers a

Answer 1

Pointers make it possible to dynamically dispatch code given conditions or state of the program. A simple way of understanding this concept is to think of a tree structure where each node represents either a function call, variable, or a pointer to a sublevel node. Once you understand this you then use pointers to point to established memory locations that the program can reference at will to understand the intitial state and thus the first dereference and offset. Then each node will contain it's own pointers to further understand the state whereby a further dereference can take place, a function can be called, or a value grabbed.

Of course this is just one way of visualizing how pointers can be used since a pointer is nothing more than an address of a memory location. You can also use pointers for message passing, virtual function calls, garbage collection, etc. In fact I have used them to recreate c++ style virtual function calls. The result is that the c virtual function and c++ virtual functions run at the exact same speed. However the c implementation was much smaller in size (66% less in KB) and slightly more portable. But replicating features from other languages in C will not always be advantageous, obviously b/c other languages could be better equipped to gather information that the compiler can use for optimization of that data structure.

In summary there is a lot that can be done with pointers. The C language and pointers are devalued nowadays b/c most higher level languages come equipped with the more often used data structures / implementations that you would have had to build on your own with the use of pointers. But there are always times when a programmer may need to implement a complex routine and in this case knowing how to use pointers is a very good thing.