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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 ...
The C programming language manages memory statically, automatically, or dynamically.Static-duration variables are allocated in main memory, usually along with the executable code of the program, and persist for the lifetime of the program; automatic-duration variables are allocated on the stack and come and go as functions are called and return.
The address and value parameters may contain expressions, as long as the evaluated expressions correspond to valid memory addresses or values, respectively.A valid address in this context is an address within the computer's address space, while a valid value is (typically) an unsigned value between zero and the maximum unsigned number that the minimum addressable unit (memory cell) may hold.
A computer program can access an address given explicitly – in low-level programming this is usually called an absolute address, or sometimes a specific address, and is known as pointer data type in higher-level languages. But a program can also use relative address which specifies a location in relation to somewhere else (the base address).
The C programming language provides many standard library functions for file input and output.These functions make up the bulk of the C standard library header <stdio.h>. [1] The functionality descends from a "portable I/O package" written by Mike Lesk at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, [2] and officially became part of the Unix operating system in Version 7.
While d and b1 will point to the same memory location after execution of this code, b2 will point to the location d+8 (eight bytes beyond the memory location of d). Thus, b2 points to the region within d that "looks like" an instance of B2, i.e., has the same memory layout as an instance of B2. [clarification needed]
In a segmented architecture computer, a far pointer is a pointer to memory in a specific context, [1] such as a segment selector making it possible to point to addresses outside of the default segment. Comparison and arithmetic on far pointers is problematic: there can be several different segment-offset address pairs pointing to one physical ...
The variables p and q cannot alias (i.e., they never point to the same memory location). The variables p and q must alias (i.e., they always point to the same memory location). It cannot be conclusively determined at compile time if p and q alias or not. If p and q cannot alias, then i = p.foo + 3; can be changed to i = 4.