Advantages of using pointers

A pointer is a variable that stores the address of another variable. Its main advantages are:

1. Call by reference: functions can change the caller's variables (for example swap(&a, &b)) and can return more than one result.
2. Efficient array and string handling: elements are reached by pointer arithmetic, which is fast and compact, and large arrays or structures are passed by address without copying.
3. Dynamic memory allocation: memory can be taken and freed at run time with malloc(), calloc() and free(), so the program uses only the memory it needs.
4. Data structures: linked lists, stacks, queues, trees and graphs are built with pointers.
5. Functions as arguments: pointers to functions allow callbacks and menu tables.
6. Direct memory access: useful in system and hardware programming.
7. Arrays of pointers (such as an array of strings) save memory and make sorting easy, since only the pointers are exchanged.