In
computer science, a
pointer is a
programming language object, whose value refers to (or "
points to") another value stored elsewhere in the
computer memory using its
address. A pointer
references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as
dereferencing the pointer. As an analogy, a page number in a book's index could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number.