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Pointers explained: (europe.pub)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 7 points 4 months ago (7 children)

Real talk: is there any practical use-case for T*** of any pointee type?

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  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    Dynamically allocated multidimensional arrays.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Ah right, so that would be a 3D array.

    • T* is a single row of T
    • T** is a list of rows
    • T*** is a list of "layers" in the third dimension

    This would be incredibly hazardous to pass around as a bare pointer with no context, though. I'd expect to see this in a struct that, at minimum, also includes fields for the size of each dimension.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Where?

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    In the C programming language. Or do you mean which C project specifically? Because as Technus surmises in their response, it's usually a better idea to set up aliases (typedefs or heck, even #defines) so that you're offloading some of the mental strain keeping track of the layers, and that's likely to be what happens in production code.

    But the underlying data type is still T***.

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