Direct invocation vs indirect invocation in C
- by Mohit Deshpande
I am new to C and I was reading about how pointers "point" to the address of another variable. So I have tried indirect invocation and direct invocation and received the same results (as any C/C++ developer could have predicted). This is what I did:
int cost;
int *cost_ptr;
int main()
{
cost_ptr = &cost; //assign pointer to cost
cost = 100; //intialize cost with a value
printf("\nDirect Access: %d", cost);
cost = 0; //reset the value
*cost_ptr = 100;
printf("\nIndirect Access: %d", *cost_ptr);
//some code here
return 0; //1
}
So I am wondering if indirect invocation with pointers has any advantages over direct invocation or vice-versa. Some advantages/disadvantages could include speed, amount of memory consumed performing the operation (most likely the same but I just wanted to put that out there), safeness (like dangling pointers) , good programming practice, etc.
1Funny thing, I am using the GNU C Compiler (gcc) and it still compiles without the return statement and everything is as expected. Maybe because the C++ compiler will automatically insert the return statement if you forget.
