Editing Pointer (computer programming) (section)

===BASIC===
Several old versions of [[BASIC]] for the Windows platform had support for STRPTR() to return the address of a string, and for VARPTR() to return the address of a variable. Visual Basic 5 also had support for OBJPTR() to return the address of an object interface, and for an ADDRESSOF operator to return the address of a function. The types of all of these are integers, but their values are equivalent to those held by pointer types.

Newer dialects of [[BASIC]], such as [[FreeBASIC]] or [[BlitzMax]], have exhaustive pointer implementations, however. In FreeBASIC, arithmetic on <code>ANY</code> pointers (equivalent to C's <code>void*</code>) are treated as though the <code>ANY</code> pointer was a byte width. <code>ANY</code> pointers cannot be dereferenced, as in C. Also, casting between <code>ANY</code> and any other type's pointers will not generate any warnings.

<syntaxhighlight lang="BlitzMax">
dim as integer f = 257
dim as any ptr g = @f
dim as integer ptr i = g
assert(*i = 257)
assert( (g + 4) = (@f + 1) )
</syntaxhighlight>