akshay.deo

 Profile Answers by akshay.deo 

• Aug 3rd, 2010

 

Though all the pointers occupy 4 bytes (32 bit compiler) they can point to wide range of data types. These data types have different structure for e.g int is 4 byte wide, char is 1 byte wide ... So manipulation of the corresponding pointers needs to be different. Like for  char * p... p++ will always move ahead by 1 byte and for int *p, p++ will move ahead by 4 bytes. 

jbode

 Profile Answers by jbode Questions by jbode

• Aug 4th, 2010

 

It's *not* guaranteed that all pointer types take up the same amount of space or have the same alignment.  One example that comes to mind is a word-addressed system; accessing an individual char requires the word address plus an offset, so a pointer to char would be wider than a pointer to int.

mohamr2

 Profile Answers by mohamr2 

• Sep 20th, 2010

 

Its not that we require different pointer, actually pointer are of the same size depending on the target platform that the memory belongs to. It is the pointer type that matters, we require an int pointer to specify that the data that the pointer points to is an int... similarly for char... hence to identify what kind of data is actually pointed by the pointer we use different pointer types...

supriti.dan

 Profile Answers by supriti.dan 

• Nov 30th, 2010

 

Pointer is a special kind of variable which can hold the address of other
variable. As the address of any variable is a integer that's why pointer
variable itself is always of integer type but in case of pointer variable
declaration, we use different kind of data type to refer that particular pointer
can hold the address of mentioned data type.

Example: char b='w';
/> char *a=&b;
that means a is a pointer variable which is able to hold the
address of any char variable.