Formal Description
In computer science, a pointer is a kind of reference.
A data primitive (or just primitive) is any datum that can be read from or written to computer memory using one memory access (for instance, both a byte and a word are primitives).
A data aggregate (or just aggregate) is a group of primitives that are logically contiguous in memory and that are viewed collectively as one datum (for instance, an aggregate could be 3 logically contiguous bytes, the values of which represent the 3 coordinates of a point in space); when an aggregate is entirely composed of the same type of primitive, the aggregate may be called an array; in a sense, a multi-byte word primitive is an array of bytes, and some programs use words in this way.
In the context of these definitions, a byte is the smallest primitive; each memory address specifies a different byte. The memory address of the first byte of a datum is considered the memory address (or base memory address) of the entire datum.
A memory pointer (or just pointer) is a primitive, the value of which is intended to be used as a memory address; it is said that a pointer points to a memory address. It is also said that a pointer points to a datum when the pointer's value is the datum's memory address.
More generally, a pointer is a kind of reference, and it is said that a pointer references a datum stored somewhere in memory; to obtain that datum is to dereference the pointer. The feature that separates pointers from other kinds of reference is that a pointer's value is meant to be interpreted as a memory address, which is a rather low-level concept.
References serve as a level of indirection: A pointer's value determines which memory address (that is, which datum) is to be used in a calculation. Because indirection is a fundamental aspect of algorithms, pointers are often expressed as a fundamental data type in programming languages; in statically (or strongly) typed programming languages, the type of a pointer determines the type of the datum to which the pointer points.
Read more about this topic: Pointer (computer Programming)
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