<P> In computer science, a pointer is a programming language object, whose value refers to (or "points to") another value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its memory address . A pointer references a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as dereferencing the pointer . As an analogy, a page number in a book's index could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number and reading the text found on the indexed page . </P> <P> Pointers to data significantly improve performance for repetitive operations such as traversing strings, lookup tables, control tables and tree structures . In particular, it is often much cheaper in time and space to copy and dereference pointers than it is to copy and access the data to which the pointers point . </P> <P> Pointers are also used to hold the addresses of entry points for called subroutines in procedural programming and for run - time linking to dynamic link libraries (DLLs). In object - oriented programming, pointers to functions are used for binding methods, often using what are called virtual method tables . </P>

What is the use of pointers to pointers