Week 6

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//     Week 6 : Pointers
//----------------------------------

//  I remembered when I was studying object-oriented at the university level and
//  had visited the student tutor.
//  I had asked him to explain what is a pointer and can you explain it to me?
//  The only thing I recalled from that particular lesson was
//  "follow the pointer". Yeah...That wasn't really that helpful.
//  To be honest, it took me a while to figure out what a pointer truly meant.
//  Even today, I think my grasp of pointers is pretty good,
//  but my mastery of advanced level of pointer still needs work.
//  Let's start with the fundamentals first.

//  What is a pointer?
//  The best metaphor that I came up with is, a pointer is a finger and nothing more.
//  A finger can point at things and tell you what's at that specific location.
//  When it comes to development, a pointer is meant to "point" at a specific address and
//  tell you what's at that address.
//  Is it an integer, is it a character, or is it a string? Who knows.

//  What is the purpose of a pointer?
//  To conserve memory and make efficient programs.
//  Instead of working with actual data, wouldn't it be
//  easier just to point at what you need instead?

//  What I didn't know until recently is that a pointer can only point to three things.
//  A pointer can only point at another address, another pointer, or a null value.
//  You can't have a pointer point at something else
//  besides these three.

//  So, let's start.
//  Declaring a pointer
//  There are three ways to declare a pointer, but they all mean the same thing.
//  int* pointer1;
//  int * pointer1;
//  int *pointer1;
//  I generally like the first declaration of the pointer.
//  What you see here is a "*" symbol, correct?
//  That just means that you have declared a pointer that is pointing to an int dataspace.
//  So, you must be dealing with integer only.

//  Intializing a pointer
//  int* pointer1 = 5;
//  pointer1 is pointing to the value of 5.
//  pointer1 is not the value of 5, but rather just points to it.

//  std::cout << pointer1;
//  When we perform this, we can see that pointer1 is the address of the value 5.
//  std::cout << *pointer1;
//  When we dereference pointer1 with *, we can now go to the address of pointer1 and
//  see that there is a value of 5 at that address.

//  Exercises
//

//  How to move a pointer

//  Now, we see that pointers can be used to point at a single object.
//  How about we see how pointers are used on a larger scale.

int main()
{
  // declare out first array
  int array[5] = {0,1,3,4,5};
  // declare our pointer and have intialize it to our array.
  // pointer1 is now equals to array.
  int* pointer1 = array;

  // This should output the first element of the array
  std::cout << *pointer1;

  // Now can you guess what these numbers are?
  std::cout << *(pointer1 + 2);
  std::cout << pointer1[3];
}

//  Exercises Math Pointers****

//  How to use a pointer in a function


//  Pointer Math Exercises