what is the point of pointers in objective language [closed]

Answer 1

In Objective-C (as in C) arguments to a function are passed by value, If you want your function to modify the original object, you have to pass a pointer to that object. Java and c# pass arguments by reference, so have no need for pointers.

Answer 2

well, in c# you do actually use pointers, tho not explicitly. Think of delegates, anonymous types etc etc. the garbage collection in c# can also take a hit if you are not managing your use of these reference types efficiently.

in obj-c, the playing surface is a little more exposed. I'd imagine that approach has as many cons as it has pros for exactly the reasons you stated above re the danger of memory gpf's etc.

slowly slowly, catchie monkey :)

Answer 3

One of the things that you can do with pointers and cannot do with references is incrementing them. Since pointer is an address (what has already been mentioned), changing it's value makes it point to the next/previous object in an array. It is not very useful since you can just use next/previous index on the array, but in some situations it may produce a teeny-tiny faster code (although dirtier and more error-prone).

Pointers are quite fun, when you get used to them ;)

Answer 4

Do you actually understand what pointers are ? That it is just an address to the memory space where the object is stored.

So if you work with pointers, and you pass the pointer to a function as a parameter, you only pass the address and not the complete object. This is much faster, because you don't have to copy the complete object, you just can access the values of the object through the address.

Java also uses pointers, you just don't have to worry about them yourselves. (Which in some cases is pretty annoying if u don't want to use pointers.)

Edit

int nvar=2;
int* pvar=&nvar;

here you can see that if I take a reference of the integer "nvar", I can put it in the pointer to integer "pvar". So that's the connection between pointers and references ( in C++, in this case )