pointer

Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end. (Henry Spencer, found at http://www.sysprog.net/quotlang.html)

Programmers have all sorts of pointers: indirect pointers, dangling pointers, stack pointers, function pointers, array pointers.. but really all of these are just addresses; addresses that "point" to other things.

Let's say we have a list of 8 telephone numbers. I tell you that my number is the 5th in that list. The "5" is the pointer, the address that lets you find my number. Now let's make another list. This list is just numbers: 7, 6, 5 and so on. I tell you to go look at the 8th item in that list, and you find that is "5". The "3" is a pointer that points to "5". Finally, I have a list of names, and my name is 8th on the list. Next to it is the number three. So "8" is a pointer to "3" which in turn points to "5" - and yes, this is really how a lot of data structures are built and stored. The "3" that points to "5" is an "indirect" pointer, and the "8" that points to "3" is a double indirect pointer.

Confused? Here it is:

1 fred  7
2 tom   6
3 paul  4
4 mary  8
5 linda 2
6 art   1
7 perry 5
8 tony  3  --->

                  1     7
                  2     6
        -----> 3     5  -----> 
                  4     8
                  5     1
                  6     2
                  7     3
                  8     4

                    978-786-2123  (perry's number)
                    979-555-1212  (tom's number)
                    980-555-1212  (fred's number)
                    981-555-1212  (mary's number)
      ----->     982-555-1212  (my number)
                    983-555-1212  (linda's number)
                    984-555-1212  (art's number)
                    985-555-1212  (paul's number)
 

Finally, let's look at the 2nd item on our list of names. That has the number "6" on it, and when we go to look at the middle list, the 6th item has the number 9 in it. But wait, we only have 8 phone numbers. A mistake has been made, and that would be called a "dangling" pointer - something that doesn't point to anything useful or real. And of course, programmers make those mistakes too.

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