Pointers
Why Stack Overflow recommends it
Stack Overflow users link it as a quick, funny, surprisingly educational way to grasp what pointers and dereferencing are.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2009 to 2013.
What it is
A short 3-minute video explaining the concept of pointers. Stack Overflow answerers refer to it as the Binky pointer fun video, a playful animated introduction to pointers and dereferencing.
What people said
Recommends IRBMe · 2009-07 · Stack Overflow · on “Unsafe C# code snippet with pointers”
The answer is that it does not compile. You will get the following error: error CS0214: Pointers and fixed size buffers may only be used in an unsafe contex If, however, you write this: int ptr1 = 0; unsafe { int* ptr2 = &ptr1; *ptr2 = 220; } Console.WriteLine(ptr1); Then you will indeed get 220. You can also create an entire unsafe method, rather than creating specific unsafe blocks: public unsafe void Something() { /* pointer manipulation */ } Note : you also have to compile with the /unsafe switch (check "Allow unsafe code" in the project properties in Visual Studio) Edit : Have a look at Pointer fun with binky [this video] for a short, funny, yet informative video on pointers.
Recommends Ali Parr · 2009-08 · Stack Overflow · on “What is the difference between the dot (.) operator and -> operator?”
The -> is simply syntactic sugar for a pointer dereference, As others have said: pointer->method(); is a simple method of saying: (*pointer).method(); For more pointer fun, check out Binky, and his magic wand of dereferencing: [this video]
Recommends redtuna · 2013-03 · Stack Overflow · on “Change value of Reference type”
v1 and v2 are references; those are very similar to what other languages call pointers. They're very well explained in this corny (but surprisingly educational) video: [this video]