A pointer is a programming concept used in computer science to reference or point to a memory location that stores a value or an object). It is essentially a variable that stores the memory address of another variable or data structure rather than storing the data itself). A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the pointer).
Pointers are commonly used in programming and are one of the core components of the C programming language. They allow low-level memory access, dynamic memory allocation, and many other functionality in C. Pointers are useful for accessing memory locations, provide an efficient way for accessing the elements of an array structure, and are used for dynamic memory allocation as well as deallocation. Pointers are also used to form complex data structures such as linked lists, graphs, trees, etc. .
In C, a pointer is a variable that stores the memory address of another variable as its value. The address of the variable you are working with is assigned to the pointer. Pointers are declared using the * (asterisk symbol) and are also known as indirection pointers used to dereference a pointer. The general form of a pointer variable declaration is type *var-name.