In computer science, a pointer is a programming language ata type whose value refers directly to (or "points to") another value stored elsewhere in the computer memory using its address. Obtaining the value to which a pointer refers is called dereferencing the pointer. A pointer is a simple implementation of the general reference data type (although it is quite different from the facility referred to as a reference in C++). Pointers to data improve performance for repetitive operations such as traversing string and tree structures, and pointers to functions are used for binding methods in Object-oriented programming and run-time linking to Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs).