Quote:
Originally Posted by Ancient Dragon
you can NOT write a C or C++ program of any significance without using pointers. And there are thousands of reasons why you might want to use them.
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I don't really agree with this.
My first programming language was Fortran 77, and some of the most significant applications I ever wrote were in that language. Fortran 77 does not support any notion equivalent to pointers.
In C, pointers make some substantial things much
easier than other techniques, hence the many thousands of reasons you
might want to use them.
That is also true in C++ but, thanks to the standard library, it is quite possible to write substantial programs without knowing anything about pointers (the standard library often uses pointers behind the scenes, but that's implementation detail), and without running into the various mistakes that are possible with pointers. Of course, the trade-off is that it also takes time and effort to learn how to use the standard library effectively.