Pointers to Arrays

Abstract

The notion of pointers has been around computing from very early times, but traditionally their availability in Fortran has been rare so, presumably, many readers are not familiar with them. Conceptually, a pointer is a variable that does not itself contain data of interest but rather holds some sort of description of a storage location that does. In its simplest form, such a description might consist of only the starting address of the storage location containing the data of interest, but in more sophisticated realizations of the concept, additional information about the storage location, such as its size, the type and organization of data stored there, and so forth, will be embodied in the description.