Why Pointers

[Danjen]

In what situation would you use pointers and what are they? As far as I can tell, they are just used to check the next value in a sequence.

[ericfourfour]

When dealing with variables, why send an entire copy of a variable if you only need a reference to its location?

[Danjen]

So like, it lets you get the value of a variable without typing in that variable's specific name??

[ericfourfour]

If you want to be simple, I guess that sums it up.

In Turing you can dereference but you cannot reference. That is one of the downsides of Turing. There is a function called addr but it returns the address as an integer, not a pointer.

Dereference gets the variable the pointer is pointing to. Reference gets a pointer pointing to the variable.

To dereference use:

code:

^pointer_name

A pointer inside a record:

code:

^ (record_name.pointer_name)

[Danjen]

Ah, okay that clears it up then

[Tony]

Danjen wrote:

So like, it lets you get the value of a variable without typing in that variable's specific name??

Better yet, you can switch where the pointer points to, and perform the same operations on a different "variable", without really needing to know which one exactly it is.