What do people find difficult about C pointers?

Posted by Paul on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Paul
Published on 2010-10-26T16:31:57Z Indexed on 2012/10/31 17:00 UTC
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pointers

From the number of questions posted here, it's clear that people have some pretty fundemental issues when getting their heads around pointers and pointer arithmetic.

I'm curious to know why. They've never really caused me major problems (although I first learned about them back in the Neolithic). In order to write better answers to these questions, I'd like to know what people find difficult.

So, if you're struggling with pointers, or you recently were but suddenly "got it", what were the aspects of pointers that caused you problems?

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