>> Do you, or anyone, have a link to somewhere not simply explaining the technical side of pointers, but their usage in idealistic and primarily real world examples?
I often use them for parsing json on the fly in an embedded environment with limited ram. Suppose you have a runtime with 4K RAM of which 2K is available, but in comes a string that requires much more space. You can't store the string in RAM, validate it and then use the variables. What I do is parse on the fly and store the variables along with function pointers that need to process them. Once the string has ended and you're sure it's valid and checksummed you process the variables with their function pointers. This technique stretches the length of the message you're able to process, especially for stuff like 32-bit floats that have a larger string than binary representation.
I often use them for parsing json on the fly in an embedded environment with limited ram. Suppose you have a runtime with 4K RAM of which 2K is available, but in comes a string that requires much more space. You can't store the string in RAM, validate it and then use the variables. What I do is parse on the fly and store the variables along with function pointers that need to process them. Once the string has ended and you're sure it's valid and checksummed you process the variables with their function pointers. This technique stretches the length of the message you're able to process, especially for stuff like 32-bit floats that have a larger string than binary representation.