Different types of Pointers

The concept of pointers is the Beauty behind the use of C language. We know that, in general pointer refer to some address location in the memory.

There are different types of Pointers in C language that any C aspirant is ought to know about. let's have a brief glance about them.

1. pointer depending upon the type of the variable it is referring to.
ex: integer pointer, Character pointer, float pointer etc;

2. Dangling Pointer.
explanation: It is the pointer to a memory location where is varibale is stored
earlier but not present now ( destroyed or cleared or freed by the program).simply OBJECT DESTROYED BUT PATH PRESENT.

3. NULL Pointer.
explanation: To avoid the errors caused by the dangling pointer, the concept of a NULL POINTER is introduced. Whenever the NULL POINTER is dereferenced/freed, there is no scope for data corruption.
ex: #DEFINE NULL 0 //defining a null value
int *a; // defining a integer pointer
free(a); // the value at a is destroyed, hence a is a Dangling pointer
a=NULL; // now 'a' is a safe pointer

4. VOID Pointer.
explanation: also called as generic pointer. a void pointer can be of any type.
ex: *(int)p, *(float)p, *(char)p

5. CONSTANT POINTER.
explanation: the constant pointer's value cannot be changed once it is declared as CONSTANT.
ex: const int* const p= &a;

6. FUNCTION POINTER.
explanation: To store the address of a function,we need a function pointer.
ex: void main()
{void(*fp)();
fp= calling function name;
fp();
}