What is a pointer??

I program in PHP and ASP.NET with C#...

I am taking a C programming course but I do not know what a pointer is. I'm not sure if I'm just a sucky programmer or what but could someone explain to me in technical terms what a pointer is?

 

i am not expert in programming but as i remember it was a variable that holds the "address" of another variable in the memory

i hope this would help

 

Like lordadel said, a pointer is simply a variable which "points" to the location of an object. You can then access the methods, public variables etc of this object via this pointer.

 

I think this should explain it pretty good
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointer

In C# you use reference all the time (most objects are by ref), It is not the same as a pointer, but still somewhat similar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_(computer_science)

 

Pointer is an address of a variable in memory
int i;
int *j=&i;
now j holds the address of i;

 

So if you print j, is it some garbage code for the address?

 

yah it will print the address of i in the memory but it's not garabage