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Object which stores memory addresses in a computer program

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 pointer. As an analogy, a page number in a book's index could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number and reading the text found on that page. The actual format and content of a pointer variable is dependent on the underlying computer architecture. Using pointers significantly improves performance for repetitive operations, like traversing iterable data structures (e. g. strings, lookup tables, control tables and tree structures). In particular, it is often much cheaper in time and space to copy and dereference pointers than it is to copy and access the data to which the pointers point. Pointers are also used to hold the addresses of entry points for called subroutines in procedural programming and for run time linking to dynamic link libraries (DLLs). In object oriented programming, pointers to functions are used for binding methods, often using virtual method tables. A pointer is a simple, more concrete implementation of the more abstract reference data type. Several languages, especially low level languages, support some type of pointer, although some have more restrictions on their use than others. While "pointer" has been used to refer to references in general, it more properly applies to data structures whose interface explicitly allows the pointer to be manipulated (arithmetically via ) as a memory address, as opposed to a magic cookie or capability which does not allow such. Because pointers allow both protected and unprotected access to memory addresses, there are risks associated with using them, particularly in the latter case. Primitive pointers are often stored in a format similar to an integer; however, attempting to dereference or "look up" such a pointer whose value is not a valid memory address could cause a program to crash (or contain invalid data). To alleviate this potential problem, as a matter of type safety, pointers are considered a separate type parameterized by the type of data they point to, even if the underlying representation is an integer. Other measures may also be taken (such as validation and bounds checking), to verify that the pointer variable contains a value that is both a valid memory address and within the numerical range that the processor is capable of addressing.

In 1955, Soviet Ukrainian computer scientist Kateryna Yushchenko invented Address that made possible indirect addressing and addresses of the highest rank – analogous to pointers. This language was widely used on the Soviet Union computers. However, it was unknown outside the Soviet Union and usually Harold Lawson is credited with the invention, in 1964, of the pointer. In 2000, Lawson was presented the Computer Pioneer Award by the IEEE "[f]or inventing the pointer variable and introducing this concept into PL/I, thus providing for the first time, the capability to flexibly treat linked lists in a general purpose high level language". His seminal paper on the concepts appeared in the June 1967 issue of CACM entitled: PL/I List Processing. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word pointer first appeared in print as a stack pointer in a technical memorandum by the System Development Corporation.

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. A pointer is a programming concept used in computer science to reference or point to a memory location that stores a value or an object. It is essentially a variable that stores the memory address of another variable or data structure rather than storing the data itself. Pointers are commonly used in programming languages that support direct memory manipulation, such as C and C++. They allow programmers to work with memory directly, enabling efficient memory management and more complex data structures. By using pointers, you can access and modify data located in memory, pass data efficiently between functions, and create dynamic data structures like linked lists, trees, and graphs. In simpler terms, you can think of a pointer as an arrow that points to a specific spot in a computer's memory, allowing you to interact with the data stored at that location. 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 [in memory] 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.

Pointers are a very thin abstraction on top of the addressing capabilities provided by most modern architectures. In the simplest scheme, an address, or a numeric index, is assigned to each unit of memory in the system, where the unit is typically either a byte or a word – depending on whether the architecture is byte addressable or word addressable – effectively transforming all of memory into a very large array. The system would then also provide an operation to retrieve the value stored in the memory unit at a given address (usually utilizing the machine's general purpose registers). In the usual case, a pointer is large enough to hold more addresses than there are units of memory in the system. This introduces the possibility that a program may attempt to access an address which corresponds to no unit of memory, either because not enough memory is installed (i. e. beyond the range of available memory) or the architecture does not support such addresses. The first case may, in certain platforms such as the Intel x86 architecture, be called a segmentation fault (segfault). The second case is possible in the current implementation of AMD64, where pointers are 64 bit long and addresses only extend to 48 bits. Pointers must conform to certain rules (canonical addresses), so if a non canonical pointer is dereferenced, the processor raises a general protection fault. On the other hand, some systems have more units of memory than there are addresses. In this case, a more complex scheme such as memory segmentation or paging is employed to use different parts of the memory at different times. The last incarnations of the x86 architecture support up to 36 bits of physical memory addresses, which were mapped to the 32 bit linear address space through the PAE paging mechanism. Thus, only 1/16 of the possible total memory may be accessed at a time. Another example in the same computer family was the 16 bit protected mode of the 80286 processor, which, though supporting only 16 MB of physical memory, could access up to 1 GB of virtual memory, but the combination of 16 bit address and segment registers made accessing more than 64 KB in one data structure cumbersome. In order to provide a consistent interface, some architectures provide memory mapped I/O, which allows some addresses to refer to units of memory while others refer to device registers of other devices in the computer. There are analogous concepts such as file offsets, array indices, and remote object references that serve some of the same purposes as addresses for other types of objects.

Pointers are directly supported without restrictions in languages such as PL/I, C, C++, Pascal, FreeBASIC, and implicitly in most assembly languages. They are primarily used for constructing references, which in turn are fundamental to constructing nearly all data structures, as well as in passing data between different parts of a program. In functional programming languages that rely heavily on lists, data references are managed abstractly by using primitive constructs like cons and the corresponding elements car and cdr, which can be thought of as specialised pointers to the first and second components of a cons cell. This gives rise to some of the idiomatic "flavour" of functional programming. By structuring data in such cons lists, these languages facilitate recursive means for building and processing data—for example, by recursively accessing the head and tail elements of lists of lists; e. g. "taking the car of the cdr of the cdr". By contrast, memory management based on pointer dereferencing in some approximation of an array of memory addresses facilitates treating variables as slots into which data can be assigned imperatively. When dealing with arrays, the critical lookup operation typically involves a stage called address calculation which involves constructing a pointer to the desired data element in the array. In other data structures, such as linked lists, pointers are used as references to explicitly tie one piece of the structure to another. Pointers are used to pass parameters by reference. This is useful if the programmer wants a function's modifications to a parameter to be visible to the function's caller. This is also useful for returning multiple values from a function. Pointers can also be used to allocate and deallocate dynamic variables and arrays in memory. Since a variable will often become redundant after it has served its purpose, it is a waste of memory to keep it, and therefore it is good practice to deallocate it (using the original pointer reference) when it is no longer needed. Failure to do so may result in a memory leak (where available free memory gradually, or in severe cases rapidly, diminishes because of an accumulation of numerous redundant memory blocks).

When setting up data structures like lists, queues and trees, it is necessary to have pointers to help manage how the structure is implemented and controlled. Typical examples of pointers are start pointers, end pointers, and stack pointers. These pointers can either be absolute (the actual physical address or a virtual address in virtual memory) or relative (an offset from an absolute start address ("base") that typically uses fewer bits than a full address, but will usually require one additional arithmetic operation to resolve). Relative addresses are a form of manual memory segmentation, and share many of its advantages and disadvantages. A two byte offset, containing a 16 bit, unsigned integer, can be used to provide relative addressing for up to 64 KiB (216 bytes) of a data structure. This can easily be extended to 128, 256 or 512 KiB if the address pointed to is forced to be aligned on a half word, word or double word boundary (but, requiring an additional "shift left" bitwise operation—by 1, 2 or 3 bits—in order to adjust the offset by a factor of 2, 4 or 8, before its addition to the base address). Generally, though, such schemes are a lot of trouble, and for convenience to the programmer absolute addresses (and underlying that, a flat address space) is preferred. A one byte offset, such as the hexadecimal ASCII value of a character (e. g. X'29') can be used to point to an alternative integer value (or index) in an array (e. g., X'01'). In this way, characters can be very efficiently translated from 'raw data' to a usable sequential index and then to an absolute address without a lookup table.

In C and C++, even if two pointers compare as equal that doesn't mean they are equivalent. In these languages and LLVM, the rule is interpreted to mean that "just because two pointers point to the same address, does not mean they are equal in the sense that they can be used interchangeably", the difference between the pointers referred to as their provenance. Casting to an integer type such as uintptr t is implementation defined and the comparison it provides does not provide any more insight as to whether the two pointers are interchangeable. In addition, further conversion to bytes and arithmetic will throw off optimizers trying to keep track the use of pointers, a problem still being elucidated in academic research.

As a pointer allows a program to attempt to access an object that may not be defined, pointers can be the origin of a variety of programming errors. However, the usefulness of pointers is so great that it can be difficult to perform programming tasks without them. Consequently, many languages have created constructs designed to provide some of the useful features of pointers without some of their pitfalls, also sometimes referred to as pointer hazards. In this context, pointers that directly address memory (as used in this article) are referred to as raw pointers, by contrast with smart pointers or other variants. One major problem with pointers is that as long as they can be directly manipulated as a number, they can be made to point to unused addresses or to data which is being used for other purposes. Many languages, including most functional programming languages and recent imperative languages like Java, replace pointers with a more opaque type of reference, typically referred to as simply a reference, which can only be used to refer to objects and not manipulated as numbers, preventing this type of error. Array indexing is handled as a special case. A pointer which does not have any address assigned to it is called a wild pointer. Any attempt to use such uninitialized pointers can cause unexpected behavior, either because the initial value is not a valid address, or because using it may damage other parts of the program. The result is often a segmentation fault, storage violation or wild branch (if used as a function pointer or branch address). In systems with explicit memory allocation, it is possible to create a dangling pointer by deallocating the memory region it points into. This type of pointer is dangerous and subtle because a deallocated memory region may contain the same data as it did before it was deallocated but may be then reallocated and overwritten by unrelated code, unknown to the earlier code. Languages with garbage collection prevent this type of error because deallocation is performed automatically when there are no more references in scope. Some languages, like C++, support smart pointers, which use a simple form of reference counting to help track allocation of dynamic memory in addition to acting as a reference. In the absence of reference cycles, where an object refers to itself indirectly through a sequence of smart pointers, these eliminate the possibility of dangling pointers and memory leaks. Delphi strings support reference counting natively. The Rust programming language introduces a borrow checker, pointer lifetimes, and an optimisation based around option types for null pointers to eliminate pointer bugs, without resorting to garbage collection.

A null pointer has a value reserved for indicating that the pointer does not refer to a valid object. Null pointers are routinely used to represent conditions such as the end of a list of unknown length or the failure to perform some action; this use of null pointers can be compared to nullable types and to the Nothing value in an option type.

Where a pointer is used as the address of the entry point to a program or start of a function which doesn't return anything and is also either uninitialized or corrupted, if a call or jump is nevertheless made to this address, a "wild branch" is said to have occurred. In other words, a wild branch is a function pointer that is wild (dangling). The consequences are usually unpredictable and the error may present itself in several different ways depending upon whether or not the pointer is a "valid" address and whether or not there is (coincidentally) a valid instruction (opcode) at that address. The detection of a wild branch can present one of the most difficult and frustrating debugging exercises since much of the evidence may already have been destroyed beforehand or by execution of one or more inappropriate instructions at the branch location. If available, an instruction set simulator can usually not only detect a wild branch before it takes effect, but also provide a complete or partial trace of its history.

A based pointer is a pointer whose value is an offset from the value of another pointer. This can be used to store and load blocks of data, assigning the address of the beginning of the block to the base pointer.

In doubly linked lists or tree structures, a back pointer held on an element 'points back' to the item referring to the current element. These are useful for navigation and manipulation, at the expense of greater memory use.

It is possible to simulate pointer behavior using an index to an (normally one dimensional) array. Primarily for languages which do not support pointers explicitly but do support arrays, the array can be thought of and processed as if it were the entire memory range (within the scope of the particular array) and any index to it can be thought of as equivalent to a general purpose register in assembly language (that points to the individual bytes but whose actual value is relative to the start of the array, not its absolute address in memory). Assuming the array is, say, a contiguous 16 megabyte character data structure, individual bytes (or a string of contiguous bytes within the array) can be directly addressed and manipulated using the name of the array with a 31 bit unsigned integer as the simulated pointer (this is quite similar to the C arrays example shown above). Pointer arithmetic can be simulated by adding or subtracting from the index, with minimal additional overhead compared to genuine pointer arithmetic. It is even theoretically possible, using the above technique, together with a suitable instruction set simulator to simulate any machine code or the intermediate (byte code) of any processor/language in another language that does not support pointers at all (for example Java / JavaScript). To achieve this, the binary code can initially be loaded into contiguous bytes of the array for the simulator to "read", interpret and action entirely within the memory contained of the same array. If necessary, to completely avoid buffer overflow problems, bounds checking can usually be actioned for the compiler (or if not, hand coded in the simulator).

Ada is a strongly typed language where all pointers are typed and only safe type conversions are permitted. All pointers are by default initialized to null, and any attempt to access data through a null pointer causes an exception to be raised. Pointers in Ada are called access types. Ada 83 did not permit arithmetic on access types (although many compiler vendors provided for it as a non standard feature), but Ada 95 supports “safe” arithmetic on access types via the package System. Storage Elements.

The COBOL programming language supports pointers to variables. Primitive or group (record) data objects declared within the LINKAGE SECTION of a program are inherently pointer based, where the only memory allocated within the program is space for the address of the data item (typically a single memory word). In program source code, these data items are used just like any other WORKING STORAGE variable, but their contents are implicitly accessed indirectly through their LINKAGE pointers. Memory space for each pointed to data object is typically allocated dynamically using external CALL statements or via embedded extended language constructs such as EXEC CICS or EXEC SQL statements. Extended versions of COBOL also provide pointer variables declared with USAGE IS POINTER clauses. The values of such pointer variables are established and modified using SET and SET ADDRESS statements. Some extended versions of COBOL also provide PROCEDURE POINTER variables, which are capable of storing the addresses of executable code.

The PL/I language provides full support for pointers to all data types (including pointers to structures), recursion, multitasking, string handling, and extensive built in functions. PL/I was quite a leap forward compared to the programming languages of its time. PL/I pointers are untyped, and therefore no casting is required for pointer dereferencing or assignment. The declaration syntax for a pointer is DECLARE xxx POINTER;, which declares a pointer named "xxx". Pointers are used with BASED variables. A based variable can be declared with a default locator (DECLARE xxx BASED(ppp); or without (DECLARE xxx BASED;), where xxx is a based variable, which may be an element variable, a structure, or an array, and ppp is the default pointer). Such a variable can be address without an explicit pointer reference (xxx=1;, or may be addressed with an explicit reference to the default locator (ppp), or to any other pointer (qqq >xxx=1;). Pointer arithmetic is not part of the PL/I standard, but many compilers allow expressions of the form ptr = ptr±expression. IBM PL/I also has the builtin function PTRADD to perform the arithmetic. Pointer arithmetic is always performed in bytes. IBM Enterprise PL/I compilers have a new form of typed pointer called a HANDLE.

The D programming language is a derivative of C and C++ which fully supports C pointers and C typecasting.

The Eiffel object oriented language employs value and reference semantics without pointer arithmetic. Nevertheless, pointer classes are provided. They offer pointer arithmetic, typecasting, explicit memory management,
interfacing with non Eiffel software, and other features.

Go has pointers. Its declaration syntax is equivalent to that of C, but written the other way around, ending with the type. Unlike C, Go has garbage collection, and disallows pointer arithmetic. Reference types, like in C++, do not exist. Some built in types, like maps and channels, are boxed (i. e. internally they are pointers to mutable structures), and are initialized using the make function. In an approach to unified syntax between pointers and non pointers, the arrow ( >) operator has been dropped: the dot operator on a pointer refers to the field or method of the dereferenced object. This, however, only works with 1 level of indirection.

There is no explicit representation of pointers in Java. Instead, more complex data structures like objects and arrays are implemented using references. The language does not provide any explicit pointer manipulation operators. It is still possible for code to attempt to dereference a null reference (null pointer), however, which results in a run time exception being thrown. The space occupied by unreferenced memory objects is recovered automatically by garbage collection at run time.

Pointers are implemented very much as in Pascal, as are VAR parameters in procedure calls. Modula 2 is even more strongly typed than Pascal, with fewer ways to escape the type system. Some of the variants of Modula 2 (such as Modula 3) include garbage collection.

Much as with Modula 2, pointers are available. There are still fewer ways to evade the type system and so Oberon and its variants are still safer with respect to pointers than Modula 2 or its variants. As with Modula 3, garbage collection is a part of the language specification.

Unlike many languages that feature pointers, standard ISO Pascal only allows pointers to reference dynamically created variables that are anonymous and does not allow them to reference standard static or local variables. It does not have pointer arithmetic. Pointers also must have an associated type and a pointer to one type is not compatible with a pointer to another type (e. g. a pointer to a char is not compatible with a pointer to an integer). This helps eliminate the type security issues inherent with other pointer implementations, particularly those used for PL/I or C. It also removes some risks caused by dangling pointers, but the ability to dynamically let go of referenced space by using the dispose standard procedure (which has the same effect as the free library function found in C) means that the risk of dangling pointers has not been entirely eliminated. However, in some commercial and open source Pascal (or derivatives) compiler implementations —like Free Pascal, Turbo Pascal or the Object Pascal in Embarcadero Delphi— a pointer is allowed to reference standard static or local variables and can be cast from one pointer type to another. Moreover, pointer arithmetic is unrestricted: adding or subtracting from a pointer moves it by that number of bytes in either direction, but using the Inc or Dec standard procedures with it moves the pointer by the size of the data type it is declared to point to. An untyped pointer is also provided under the name Pointer, which is compatible with other pointer types.

The Perl programming language supports pointers, although rarely used, in the form of the pack and unpack functions. These are intended only for simple interactions with compiled OS libraries. In all other cases, Perl uses references, which are typed and do not allow any form of pointer arithmetic. They are used to construct complex data structures.