Simple Pointers

1. Pointers to Stack Memory

A pointer stores memory addresses. If you create a regular variable like int x = 42;, it lives on the stack. To get its memory address, you use &x. That’s called the address-of operator.

You can store this address in a pointer like int* ptr = &x;. The * tells us that ptr is a pointer to an int.

To get the actual value stored at the address in ptr, you write *ptr. This is called dereferencing the pointer. So if ptr points to x, then *ptr is the same as x. You can also use *ptr to change the value of x directly by doing something like *ptr = 99;.