Meaning – The term pointer, refers to a data element that indicates the location of another data element.
In computer science, a pointer is an object in many programming languages that stores a memory address. This can be that of another value located in computer memory, or in some cases, that of memory-mapped computer hardware. A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the pointer.
A pointer is a simple, more concrete implementation of the more abstract reference data type. Several languages, especially low-level languages, support some type of pointer, although some have more restrictions on their use than others.
Example of usage – “Using pointers significantly improves performance for repetitive operations, like traversing iterable data structures. In particular, it is often much cheaper in time and space to copy and dereference pointers than it is to copy and access the data to which the pointers point.”
