Computer Programming II in C ++

Chapter Three

Pointers

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 Computer Programming II in C ++

Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................................................................3
1. Declaring Pointers:................................................................................................................................................4
2. Assigning values to pointers:................................................................................................................................4
3. Pointer to void.......................................................................................................................................................5
4. Arrays of Pointers..................................................................................................................................................5
5. Pointer and arrays..................................................................................................................................................5
6. Pointer Advantage.................................................................................................................................................6
7. Pointer Arithmetic.................................................................................................................................................7
8. Pointer and String..................................................................................................................................................8
9. Pointer to pointer:..................................................................................................................................................9
10. Dynamic memory:.............................................................................................................................................10
a) The New Operator..........................................................................................................................................10
b) Operator delete...............................................................................................................................................11

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Introduction
 The data created by the user and assigned to variables with an assignment statement is sufficient for some
applications. With large volume of data most real-world applications use a better way of storing that data.
For this, disk files offer the solution.
 We have already seen how variables are memory cells that we can access by an identifier. But these
variables are stored in concrete places of the computer memory. For our programs, the computer memory is
only a succession of 1 byte cells (the minimum size for a datum), each one with a unique address.
 A pointer is a variable which stores the address of another variable. The only difference between pointer
variable and regular variable is the data they hold.
 There are two pointer operators in C++:
& the address of operator
* the dereference operator
 Whenever you see the & used with pointers, think of the words “address of.” The & operator always
produces the memory address of whatever it precedes. The * operator, when used with pointers, either
declares a pointer or dereferences the pointer’s value. The dereference operator can be literally translated to
"value pointed by".
 A pointer is simply the address of an object in memory. Generally, objects can be accessed in two ways:
directly by their symbolic name, or indirectly through a pointer. The act of getting to an object via a pointer
to it, is called dereferencing the pointer. Pointer variables are defined to point to objects of a specific type
so that when the pointer is dereferenced, a typed object is obtained.
 At the moment in which we declare a variable this one must be stored in a concrete location in this
succession of cells (the memory). We generally do not decide where the variable is to be placed - fortunately
that is something automatically done by the compiler and the operating system on runtime, but once the
operating system has assigned an address there are some cases in which we may be interested in knowing
where the variable is stored.
 This can be done by preceding the variable identifier by an ampersand sign (&), which literally means,
"address of”. For example:
ptr= &var;
 This would assign to variable ptr the address of variable var , since when preceding the name of the variable
var with the ampersand ( & ) character we are no longer talking about the content of the variable, but about
its address in memory.
 We are going to suppose that var has been placed in the memory address 1776 and that we write the
following:
var=25;
x=var;
ptr = &var;
 The result will be the one shown in the following diagram:

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 We have assigned to x the content of variable var as we have done in many other occasions in previous
sections, but to ptr we have assigned the address in memory where the operating system stores the value of
var , that we have imagined that it was 1776 (it can be any address). The reason is that in the allocation of
ptr we have preceded var with an ampersand ( & ) character.
 The variable that stores the address of another variable (like ptr in the previous example) is what we call a
pointer.

1. Declaring Pointers:
 Is reserving a memory location for a pointer variable in the heap. Syntax:
type * pointer_name ;
 to declare a pointer variable called p_age, do the following:
int * p_age;
 Whenever the dereference operator, *, appears in a variable declariation, the variable being declared is
always a pointer variable.

2. Assigning values to pointers:

 p_age is an integer pointer. The type of a pointer is very important. p_age can point only to integer values,
never to floating-point or other types.
 To assign p_age the address of a variable, do the following:
int age = 26;
int * p_age;
p_age = &age;
OR
int age = 26;
int * p_age = & age;
 Both ways are possible.
 If you wanted to print the value of age, do the following:
cout<<age;//prints the value of age
 Or by using pointers you can do it as follows
cout<<*p_age;//dereferences p_age;
 The dereference operator produces a value that tells the pointer where to point. Without the *, (i.e
cout<<p_age), a cout statement would print an address (the address of age). With the *, the cout prints the
value at that address.
 You can assign a different value to age with the following statement:
 age = 13; //assigns a new value to variable age
 *p_age = 13 //assigns 13 as a value to the memory p_age points at.

 N.B: the * appears before a pointer variable in only two places: when you declare a pointer variable and
when you dereference a pointer variable (to find the data it points to).

 The following program is one you should study closely. It shows more about pointers and the pointer
operators, & and *, than several pages of text could do.

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
int num = 123; // a regular integer variable
int *p_num; //declares an integer pointer
cout<< " num is "<<num<<endl;
cout<< " the address of num is "<<&num<<endl;
p_num = &num;// puts address of num in p_num;
cout<< " *p_num is "<<*p_num<<endl; //prints value of num
cout<< " p_num is "<<p_num<<endl; //prints value of P_num

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return 0;
}

3. Pointer to void
 note that we can’t assign the address of a float type variable to an integer pointer variable and similarly the
address of an interger variable can not be stored in a float or character pointer.
flaot y;
int x;
int *ip;
float *fp;
ip = &y; //illegal statement
fp = &x; //illegal statement
 That means, if a variable type and pointer to type is same, then only we can assign the address of variable to
pointer variable. And if both are different type then we can’t assign the address of variable to pointer
variable but this is also possible in C++ by declaring pointer variable as a void as follows:
void *p;
 Let us see an example:
void *p;
int x;
float y;
p = &x; //valid assignment
p = &y; //valid assignment
 The difficulty on void pointers is that, void pointers can not be de referenced. They are aimed only to store
address and the dereference operator is not allowed for void pointers.

4. Arrays of Pointers
 If you have to reserve many pointers for many different values, you might want to declare an array of
pointers.
 The following reserves an array of 10 integer pointer variables:
int *iptr[10]; //reserves an array of 10 integer pointers
 The above statement will create the following structure in RAM

iptr[4] = &age;// makes iptr[4] point to address of age.

5. Pointer and arrays

 The concept of array goes very bound to the one of pointer. In fact, the identifier of an array is equivalent to
the address of its first element, like a pointer is equivalent to the address of the first element that it points to,
so in fact they are the same thing. For example, supposing these two declarations:
int numbers [20];

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int * p;
 the following allocation would be valid:
p = numbers;
 At this point p and numbers are equivalent and they have the same properties, with the only difference that
we could assign another value to the pointer p whereas numbers will always point to the first of the 20
integer numbers of type int with which it was defined. So, unlike p, that is an ordinary variable pointer,
numbers is a constant pointer (indeed that is an Array: a constant pointer). Therefore, although the previous
expression was valid, the following allocation is not:
numbers = p;
 Because numbers is an array (constant pointer), and no values can be assigned to constant identifiers.
 N.B: An array name is just a pointer, nothing more. The array name always points to the first element stored
in the array. There for , we can have the following valid C++ code:
int ara[5] = {10,20,30,40,50};
cout<< *(ara + 2); //prints ara[2];
 The expression *(ara+2) is not vague at all if you remember that an array name is just a pointer that always
points to the array’s first element. *(ara+2) takes the address stored in ara, adds 2 to the address, and
dereferences that location.
 Consider the following character array:
char name[] = "C++ Programming";
 What output do the following cout statements produce?
cout<<name[0]; // ____C__
cout<<*name; // _____C__
cout<<*(name+3); //_________
cout<<*(name+0); //____C____

6. Pointer Advantage
 You can’t change the value of an array name, because you can’t change constants. This explains why you
can’t assign an array a new value during a program’s execution: eg: if Cname is array of characters then:
Cname = “Football”; //invalid array assignment;
 Unlike arrays, you can change a pointer variable. By changing pointers, you can make them point to
different values in memory. Have a look at the following code:

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
float v1 = 679.54;
float v2 = 900.18;
float * p_v;
p_v = &v1;
cout<< "\nthe first value is "<<*p_v;
p_v = &v2;
cout<< "\nthe second value is "<<*p_v;

return 0;
}
 You can use pointer notation and reference pointers as arrays with array notation. Study the following
program carefully. It shows the inner workings of arrays and pointer notation.

int main() {
int ctr;
int iara[5] = {10,20,30,40,50};
int *iptr;
iptr = iara; //makes iprt point to array’s first element. Or iprt = &iara[0]
cout<< "using array subscripts:\n";

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cout<< "iara\tiptr\n";
for(ctr=0;ctr<5;ctr++) {
cout<<iara[ctr]<< "\t"<< iptr[ctr]<< "\n";
}
cout<< "\nUsing pointer notation\n";
for(ctr=0;ctr<5;ctr++) {
cout<< *(iara+ctr) << "\t" << *(iptr+ctr)<< "\n";
}

return 0;
}
 Suppose that you want to store a persons name and print it. Rather than using arrays, you can use a character
pointer. The following program does just that.

int main() {
char *c ="“Meseret Belete";
cout<< "your name is : "<<c;

return 0;
}
 Suppose that you must change a string pointed to by a character pointer, if the persons name in the above
code is changed to Meseter Alemu: look at the following code:

int main() {
char *c ="Meseret Belete";
cout<< "your name is : "<<c;
c = "Meseret Alemu";
cout<< "\nnew person name is : "<<c;

return 0;
}
 If c were a character array, you could never assign it directly because an array name can’t be changed.

7. Pointer Arithmetic
 To conduct arithmetical operations on pointers is a little different than to conduct them on other integer data
types. To begin, only addition and subtraction operations are allowed to be conducted, the others make no
sense in the world of pointers. But both addition and subtraction have a different behavior with pointers
according to the size of the data type to which they point to.
 When we saw the different data types that exist, we saw that some occupy more or less space than others in
the memory. For example, in the case of integer numbers, char occupies 1 byte, short occupies 2 bytes and
long occupies 4.
 Let's suppose that we have 3 pointers:
char *mychar;
short *myshort;
long *mylong;
 And that we know that they point to memory locations 1000 , 2000 and 3000 respectively. So if we write:
mychar++;
myshort++;
mylong++;
 mychar , as you may expect, would contain the value 1001 . Nevertheless, myshort would contain the value
2002 , and mylong would contain 3004 . The reason is that when adding 1 to a pointer we are making it to
point to the following element of the same type with which it has been defined, and therefore the size in
bytes of the type pointed is added to the pointer.

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 This is
applicable both when adding and subtracting any number to a pointer.
 It is important to warn you that both increase ( ++ ) and decrease ( -- ) operators have a greater priority than
the reference operator asterisk ( * ), therefore the following expressions may lead to confusion:
*p++;
*p++ = *q++;
 The first one is equivalent to *(p++) and what it does is to increase p (the address where it points to - not the
value that contains). The second, because both increase operators ( ++ ) are after the expressions to be
evaluated and not before, first the value of *q is assigned to *p and then they are both q and p increased by
one. It is equivalent to:
*p = *q;
p++;
q++;
 Now let us have a look at a code that shows increments through an integer array:

int main() {
int iara[] = {10,20,30,40,50};
int * ip = iara;
cout<<*ip<<endl;
ip++;
cout<<*ip<<endl;
ip++;
cout<<*ip<<endl;
ip++;
cout<<*ip<<endl;

return 0;
}

8. Pointer and String

 If you declare a character table with 5 rows and 20 columns, each row would contain the same number of
characters. You can define the table with the following statement.
 char names[5][20] ={{"George"},{"Mesfin"},{"John"},{"Kim"},{"Barbara"}};
 The above statement will create the following table in memory:

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 Notice that much of the table is waster space. Each row takes 20 characters, even though the data in each
row takes far fewer characters.
 To fix the memory-wasting problem of fully justified tables, you should declare a single-dimensional array
of character pointers. Each pointer points to a string in memory and the strings do not have to be the same
length.
 Here is the definition for such an array:
char names[5][20] ={{"George"},{"Mesfin"},{"John"},{"Kim"},{"Barbara"}};
 This array is a single-dimension array. The asterisk before names makes this array an array of pointers. Each
string takes only as much memory as is needed by the string and its terminating zero. At this time, we will
have this structure in memory:
 To print the first string, we should use:
cout<<*names; //prints George.
 To print the second use:
cout<< *(names+1); //prints Michael
 Whenever you dereference any pointer element with the * dereferencing operator, you access one of the
strings in the array.

9. Pointer to pointer:
 As the memory address where integer, float or character is stored in can be stored into a pointer variable, the
address of a pointer can also be stored in another pointer. This pointer is said to be pointer to a pointer.
 An array of pointer is conceptually same as pointer to pointer type. The pointer to pointer type is declared as
follows:
Data_type ** pointer_name;
 Note that the asterisk is double here.
int **p; //p is a pointer which holds the address another pointer.
 E.g.:
char a;
char * b;
char ** c;
a = 'z';
b = &a;
c = &b;
 This, supposing the randomly chosen memory locations of 7230 , 8092 and 10502 , could be described thus:

(inside the cells there is the content of the variable; under the cells its location)
 Have a look at the following code:

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#include<iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
int data;
int *p1;
int **p2;
data = 15;
cout<< "data = "<<data<<endl;
p1 = &data;
p2 = &p1;
cout<< "data through p1 = "<<*p1<<endl;
cout<< "data through p2 = "<< **p2<<endl;

return 0;
}

10. Dynamic memory:

 Until now, in our programs, we have only had as much memory as we have requested in declarations of
variables, arrays and other objects that we included, having the size of all of them to be fixed before the
execution of the program. But, What if we need a variable amount of memory that can only be determined
during the program execution (runtime)? For example, in case that we need a user input to determine the
necessary amount of space. The answer is dynamic memory, for which C++ integrates the operators new and
delete.
 Pointers are useful for creating dynamic objects during program execution. Unlike normal (global and
local) objects which are allocated storage on the runtime stack, a dynamic object is allocated memory from
a different storage area called the heap. Dynamic objects do not obey the normal scope rules. Their scope is
explicitly controlled by the programmer.
a) The New Operator
◦ In C++ new operator can create space dynamically i.e at run time, and similarly delete operator is also
available which releases the memory taken by a variable and return memory to the operating system.
◦ When the space is created for a variable at compile time this approach is called static. If space is created
at run time for a variable, this approach is called dynamic. See the following two lines:
int a[10];//creation of static array
int *a;
a = new int[10];//creation of dynamic array
◦ Lets have another example:
int * ptr3;
ptr3 = new int [5];
◦ In this case, the operating system has assigned space for 5 elements of type int in the heap and it has
returned a pointer to its beginning that has been assigned to ptr3 . Therefore, now, ptr3 points to a valid
block of memory with space for 5 int elements.

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◦ You could ask what is the difference between declaring a normal array and assigning memory to a
pointer as we have just done. The most important one is that the size of an array must be a constant
value, which limits its size to what we decide at the moment of designing the program before its
execution, whereas the dynamic memory allocation allows assigning memory during the execution of
the program using any variable, constant or combination of both as size.
◦ The dynamic memory is generally managed by the operating system, and in the multi-task interfaces can
be shared between several applications, so there is a possibility that the memory exhausts. If this
happens and the operating system cannot assign the memory that we request with the operator new , a
null pointer will be returned. For that reason it is recommendable to always verify if after a call to
instruction new the returned pointer is null:
int * ptr3;
ptr3 = new int [5];
if (ptr3 == NULL) {
// error assigning memory. Take measures.
};
◦ if ptr3 is NULL, it means that there is no enough memory location in the heap to be given for ptr3.
b) Operator delete
◦ Since the necessity of dynamic memory is usually limited to concrete moments within a program, once
this one is no longer needed it shall be freed so that it become available for future requests of dynamic
memory. For this exists the operator delete , whose form is:
delete pointer ;
or
delete [] pointer ;
◦ The first expression should be used to delete memory allocated for a single element, and the second one
for memory allocated for multiple elements (arrays).
◦ In most compilers both expressions are equivalent and can be used without distinction, although indeed
they are two different operators and so must be considered for operator overloading.
◦ In the following simple example, a program that memorizes numbers, does not have a limited amount of
numbers that can be introduced, thanks to the concept and power of pointer that we request to the system
as much space as it is necessary to store all the numbers that the user wishes to introduce.

# include <iostream>
# include <stdlib>

int main() {
char input[100];
int i, n;
long * num; // total = 0;
cout << "How many numbers do you want to type in? ";
cin.getline(input, 100);
i = atoi(input);
num = new
long[i];
if (num == NULL) {
cout << "\nno enough memory!";
exit(1);
}

for (n=0; n < i; n++) {

cout << "Enter number: ";
cin.getline (input, 100);
num[n]=atol (input);
}
cout << "You have entered: ";

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for (n=0; n < i; n++)

cout << num[n] << ", ";

delete[] num;

return 0;
}
◦ NULL is a constant value defined in C++ libraries specially designed to indicate null pointers. In case
that this constant is not defined you can do it yourself by defining it to 0:

 Finished

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