2.3. Compound Types

A compound type is a type that is defined in terms of another type. C++ has several compound types, two of which—references and pointers—we’ll cover in this chapter.

Defining variables of compound type is more complicated than the declarations we’ve seen so far. In § 2.2 (p. 41) we said that simple declarations consist of a type followed by a list of variable names. More generally, a declaration is a base type followed by a list of declarators. Each declarator names a variable and gives the variable a type that is related to the base type.

The declarations we have seen so far have declarators that are nothing more than variable names. The type of such variables is the base type of the declaration. More complicated declarators specify variables with compound types that are built from the base type of the declaration.