Pointers

Spice supports pointers by providing the address-of operator & and indirection operator *.
For any primitive or custom data type you can also use the respective pointer type. For the int type, the pointer type is int*.

Usage¶

See an example here:

int variable = 1234;
int* variablePtr = &variable;
printf("Value: %d, Pointer: %p", *variablePtr, variablePtr);

Here is a more complex example where pointers are used to pass a reference of a person to a procedure and modify a field.

type Person struct {
    string firstName
    string lastName
    int age
}

p birthday(Person* person) {
    person.age++;
}

f<int> main() {
    dyn mike = Person { "Mike", "Miller", 32 };
    printf("Age before birthday: %d\n", mike.age);
    birthday(&mike);
    printf("Age after birthday: %d", mike.age);
}

Multiple pointers

Spice also supports the usage of double, triple, ... pointers like char*** or types like int*[]*. Please use such types sparingly and only where necessary, due to readability reasons.
To get the pointer to the pointer to an integer, you can use &&intVariable and **doubleIntPtr in reverse.
The member access operator automatically de-references the left side, no matter how many indirections there are.