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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

Pointers aren't hard, it's C/C++ that make them complicated. Addresses and indirection in any assembly language are simple and straightforward, easy and even intuitive once you start actually writing programs.

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C and C++ pointers aren't any harder than pointers in assembly, at least as far as novices complaining about pointers being hard are concerned.

They are though! Indirection in assembly is just something like:

  ldr dest, [src, offset]

It's straightforward and pretty hard to mess up, and easy to read to because the format is consistent.

Whereas in C all the following are valid (and it becomes even more confusing with assignment in the declaration statement, tons of footguns and weird syntax):

  int* a;
  int *a;
  int a[];
  int a[5];

Assignment is weird too, especially because dereferencing and defining a pointer both use '*'.

  *a   = c;
  a[0] = c;

Then you have structs/unions and their members, and what if those are pointers? You get . and -> syntax. It's weird and complicated, much much more complicated than assembly. That's before you get to casting and types which make C much more complicated than assembly for doing low level stuff.

Tell that to the thousands of comp sci students who drop out every year because they don't like programming in C!

I used to think I was incapable of learning "real" programming because I didn't get C. When I later read a book on programming in assembly, I realized that everything that had felt so complex was actually not so difficult. C pointer syntax is weird and doesn't parse naturally for many people, especially programming novices who might not yet have a solid grasp on what/how/why they're doing anything.

Right, but it's hard to tell how much confusion is caused by C syntax vs the idea of a memory address.

In particular I think people are very confused by declaring pointers and the overloaded meaning of the dereference operator.

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