Demystifying computer programming: primitives and pointers

Photo by Peter Robbins on Unsplash

A lot of ordinary words have specialized meanings for computer programming, and as they become part of the technical jargon, they acquire a sheen of mystique, even if the specialized meaning is very close to the general meaning.

Take pointers, for example. In general parlance, a pointer is simply something that points in a given direction. In computer programming…