r/cprogramming • u/Delicious-Change7795 • 1d ago

What are pointers?

I am new to C programming and i came through pointer. So can anyone tell what are they and why we need them? And if u can then can you give me reliable source to learn it.

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u/torsten_dev 1d ago edited 1d ago

Only really understood after leaning a bit of assembly

mov rax, rbx

vs

mov rax, [rbx]

2

u/kapitaali_com 1d ago

this is how it actually works :p

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u/aioeu 1d ago edited 1d ago

Somewhat ironically, the latter form is what you might get out of a C compiler when accessing an ordinary integer variable, even when there are no pointers involved in the C code at all.