add pointers concept

[bobahop]

Still very much a WIP.

[bobahop]

I haven't touched this in a while. I think it's ready for some critique.

[wolf99]

Worth mentioning that quite often addresses are displayed in hexadecimal format by convention?
Just a suggestion, not sure if this is needed or not.

[bobahop]

@wolf99 , thank you very much for you exhaustive critique! I already committed almost all of your suggestions. I'll go back through it and smooth out indirection/dereferencing and backticking the types consistently. There is also the wording of the "two pointers" for me to look at, and removing the online compiler comment. And whatever else I'm not thinking of right now.

It occurs to me that I didn't cover freeing pointers in this, so perhaps a small section on that should be added?

[wolf99]

Thanks for adding the concepts, it's great to get any contribution!

On freeing pointers; Im not sure what you have in mind exactly but maybe that's more like freeing dynamically allocated memory than freeing a pointer? Although you could possibly explain something about setting pointers to NULL is the equivalent of "un-setting" a pointer, as it were;
it may be best to avoid mixing dynamic memory handling in here if at all possible.

[bobahop]

@wolf99 I think you're right. That's probably why I didn't add that to begin with.

[bobahop]

Latest commits failed "Fail with link errors". Didn't use hyperlinks in the text, so I don't know what this is referring to.

[wolf99]

The links seem to be failing due to an unrelated link that refers to the website of the test framework that we use.
Looking at that link my browser tells me the website's TLS certificate is not valid, so it looks like a "Them" problem rather than an "Us" problem.
I'll raise an issue to fix this separately.
So for the purposes of this PR we can ignore it as an SEP.

[bobahop]

Thanks very much! I just committed changes for the wording, and also the line breaks you suggested and then deleted. I liked the suggestion so I kept it.

[wolf99]

This looks good to me @bobahop .
If you'd like to move it from a draft to "Ready for Review" I can approve.

[wolf99]

Just had a thought: what about restrict ?

[bobahop]

I'm not very familiar with restrict. I've heard of it. I think I've seen it in one solution, but haven't gotten around to assimilating it.

[wolf99]

Hey Bob,
As a solution to get this merged I suggest we go ahead as-is, but if you could open an issue to add restrict to this concept so that you or someone else could pick it up separately.
When creating that issue it would be good to link this PR in it also, to keep the context.

[wolf99]

Woo, thanks Bob! 🚀