asking

nawazish abbas

14y1.5k

please give me a broad explanation on filing and pointer in C#

3 Replies

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

Senthilkumar14y ago
Hi,

In an unsafe context, a type may be a pointer type as well as a value type or a reference type. A pointer type declaration takes one of the following forms:

type* identifier;
void* identifier; //allowed but not recommended
Any of the following types may be a pointer type:

sbyte, byte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, ulong, char, float, double, decimal, or bool.

Any enum type.

Any pointer type.

Any user-defined struct type that contains fields of unmanaged types only.

Pointer types do not inherit from object and no conversions exist between pointer types and object. Also, boxing and unboxing do not support pointers. However, you can convert between different pointer types and between pointer types and integral types.

When you declare multiple pointers in the same declaration, the * is written along with the underlying type only, not as a prefix to each pointer name.

For more info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/y31yhkeb(v=vs.80).aspx
http://imrannazar.com/Using-Pointers-in-C
Jignesh Trivedi14y ago
hi,

C# supports pointers in a limited extent. A pointer is nothing but a variable that holds the memory address of another type. But in C# pointer can only be declared to hold the memory address of value types and arrays. Unlike reference types, pointer types are not tracked by the default garbage collection mechanism. For the same reason pointers are not allowed to point to a reference type or even to a structure type which contains a reference type.
Declaring a Pointer type
int *myPointer;
you can use pointer using unsafe keyword.
unsafe
{
   int x = 10;
   int *ptr1 = &x;
   Console.WriteLine((int)ptr1);
   Console.WriteLine(*ptr1);
}

hope this help.
Satyapriya Nayak14y ago
Hi nawazish,

Please refer the below links

http://imrannazar.com/Using-Pointers-in-C

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/1453/Getting-unsafe-with-pointers-in-C

Thanks