By Stefan Schulze Frielinghaus

A pointer references a location in memory and dereferencing a pointer refers to the lookup of the value of the memory location the pointer references. The value of a pointer is a memory address. The C standard does not define the representation of a memory address. This is crucial since not every architecture makes use of the same memory addressing paradigm. Most modern architectures make use of a linear address space or something similar. Still, even this is not precise enough since you might want to talk about physical or virtual addresses. Some architectures make even use of non-numeric addresses. For example, the Symbolics Lisp Machine makes use of tuples of the form (object, offset) as addresses.

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