Question

 

Topic: The concept of pointers in C++ is inherited from the C language, which relies extensively on the use of pointers. What are the advantages and disadvantages of having the functionality of pointers in a programming language?

Answer 1

Pointer Variable:

A pointer variable is a special type of variable that is used to store the address of another variable which has a similar data type as the pointer data type. The dereferenced operator '*' is used to access the value stored at that location that is stored by the pointer variable.

For example:

int a = 10;

int *b = &a;

Here, the variable 'b' is a pointer variable that stores the address of an integer type variable.

Advantages:

• The use of pointer reduce the source code and improve performance.
• The multiple values can be returned by using the pointer.
• The array and the string can be passed to a function more efficiently.
• It is used to manage dynamic memory allocation.

Disadvantages:

• Pointer can cause a segmentation fault.
• The dynamically allocated memory must be freed explicitly to avoid the memory leakage problem.
• The illegal use of pointer may corrupt the memory.
• Pointers are slower as compare to the normal variables.