> What are pointers in the hardware? Under current "flat address space" architectures, a pointer in the hardware is nothing more than a memory address, represe

> What are pointers in the hardware? Under current "flat address space" architectures, a pointer in the hardware is nothing more than a memory address, represented as an integer. That is, a pointer with value 0x12345678 is the address of the memory 0x12345678 bytes above the start of the virtual address space. In the C language, pointers are more abstract: they have to point to either within an object, or one past the end of an object. This is because there are architectures like segmented architectures, where a pointer has two parts (segment and offset) and cannot be treated just like an integer, and the same C program should in theory be able to also run in these architectures without change.