What does address-of operator (&) mean?

In most programming languages, the address-of operator & is used to get the memory address of a variable. For example, if you have a variable x that contains the value 5, you can get the memory address of x by using the & operator in front of it. So, if you wrote &x, it would give you the memory address where the value 5 is stored in memory.

More information

The address-of operator & is commonly used for two main purposes in programming.

First, as mentioned earlier, the & operator is used to get the memory address of a variable. This can be useful in certain situations, such as when you want to pass the address of a variable to a function as an argument.

Second, the & operator is also often used in combination with the dereference operator * to create a reference to a variable. In this case, the & operator is used to get the address of a variable, and the * operator is used to create a reference to that variable. This reference can then be used to access and modify the original variable, as if it were a pointer.

For example, in C++, you could use the & and * operators like this:

int x = 5;
int *ptr = &x;  // Get the address of x and create a reference to it using the * operator
*ptr = 10;      // Use the reference to modify the value of x

// At this point, the value of x is 10

In this example, the ptr variable is a reference to the x variable, which means that you can use ptr to access and modify the value of x as if it were a pointer.

The & operator is a useful tool for working with memory addresses and references in programming, and it has many applications in a variety of situations.