8.11. Wrap-Up

In this chapter we provided a detailed introduction to pointers—variables that contain memory addresses as their values. We began by demonstrating how to declare and initialize pointers. You saw how to use the address operator (&) to assign the address of a variable to a pointer and the indirection operator (*) to access the data stored in the variable indirectly referenced by a pointer. We discussed passing arguments by reference using pointer arguments.

We discussed how to declare and use built-in arrays, which C++ inherited from the C programming language. You learned how to use const with pointers to enforce the principle of least privilege. We demonstrated using nonconstant pointers to nonconstant data, nonconstant pointers to constant data, constant pointers to nonconstant data, and constant pointers to constant data. We discussed the compile-time sizeof operator, which can be used to determine the sizes of data types and variables in bytes at compile time.

We discussed how to use pointers in arithmetic and comparison expressions. You saw that pointer arithmetic can be used to move from one element of a built-in array to another. We briefly introduced pointer-based strings.

In the next chapter, we begin our deeper treatment of classes. You’ll learn about the scope of a class’s members and how to keep objects in a consistent state. You’ll also learn about using special member functions called constructors and destructors, which execute when an object is created and destroyed, respectively, and we’ll discuss when constructors and destructors are called. In addition, we’ll demonstrate using default arguments with constructors and using default memberwise assignment to assign one object of a class to another object of the same class. We’ll also discuss the danger of returning a reference to a private data member of a class.