Dev C++ What Is It

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Orwell Dev-C is a full-featured Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for the C/C programming language. It uses Mingw port of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) as its compiler. Dev-C is a free IDE for Windows that uses either MinGW or TDM-GCC as underlying compiler. Originally released by Bloodshed Software, but abandoned in 2006, it has recently been forked by Orwell, including a choice of more recent compilers.

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C++ pointers are easy and fun to learn. Some C++ tasks are performed more easily with pointers, and other C++ tasks, such as dynamic memory allocation, cannot be performed without them.

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As you know every variable is a memory location and every memory location has its address defined which can be accessed using ampersand (&) operator which denotes an address in memory. Consider the following which will print the address of the variables defined −

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When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces the following result −

Dev C++ What Is It Made

What are Pointers?

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A pointer is a variable whose value is the address of another variable. Like any variable or constant, you must declare a pointer before you can work with it. The general form of a pointer variable declaration is −

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Here, type is the pointer's base type; it must be a valid C++ type and var-name is the name of the pointer variable. The asterisk you used to declare a pointer is the same asterisk that you use for multiplication. However, in this statement the asterisk is being used to designate a variable as a pointer. Following are the valid pointer declaration −

The actual data type of the value of all pointers, whether integer, float, character, or otherwise, is the same, a long hexadecimal number that represents a memory address. The only difference between pointers of different data types is the data type of the variable or constant that the pointer points to.

Using Pointers in C++

There are few important operations, which we will do with the pointers very frequently. (a) We define a pointer variable. (b) Assign the address of a variable to a pointer. (c) Finally access the value at the address available in the pointer variable. This is done by using unary operator * that returns the value of the variable located at the address specified by its operand. Following example makes use of these operations −

When the above code is compiled and executed, it produces result something as follows −

Pointers in C++

Pointers have many but easy concepts and they are very important to C++ programming. There are following few important pointer concepts which should be clear to a C++ programmer −

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Sr.NoConcept & Description
1Null Pointers

C++ supports null pointer, which is a constant with a value of zero defined in several standard libraries.

2Pointer Arithmetic

There are four arithmetic operators that can be used on pointers: ++, --, +, -

3Pointers vs Arrays

There is a close relationship between pointers and arrays.

4Array of Pointers

You can define arrays to hold a number of pointers.

5Pointer to Pointer

C++ allows you to have pointer on a pointer and so on.

6Passing Pointers to Functions

Passing an argument by reference or by address both enable the passed argument to be changed in the calling function by the called function.

7Return Pointer from Functions

C++ allows a function to return a pointer to local variable, static variable and dynamically allocated memory as well.