Does Kotlin have pointers?

Question

Does Kotlin have pointers? If yes,

1. How to increment a Pointer?

2. How to decrement a Pointer?

3. How to do Pointer Comparisons?

Answer 1

It has references, and it doesn't support pointer arithmetic (so you can't increment or decrement).

Note that the only thing that "having pointers" allows you is the ability to create a pointer and to dereference it.

The closest thing to a "pointer comparison" is referential equality, which is performed with the === operator.

Answer 2

There is no pointers in Kotlin for low-level processing as C.

However, it's possible emulate pointers in high-level programming.

For low-level programming it is necessary using special system APIs to simulate arrays in memories, that exists in Windows, Linux, etc. Read about memory mapped files here and here. Java has library to read and write directly in memory.

Single types (numeric, string and boolean) are values, however, other types are references (high level pointers) in Kotlin, that one can compare, assign, etc.

If one needs increment or decrement pointers, just encapsulate the desired data package into a array

For simulate pointers to simple values it just wrap the value in a class:

data class pStr (   // Pointer to a String
  var s:String=""
)

fun main() {
 var st=pStr("banana")
 var tt=st
 tt.s = "melon"
 println(st.s) // display "melon"

 var s:String = "banana"
 var t:String = s
 t.s = "melon"
 println(s.s) // display "banana"
}