DAVID J. MALAN: Let's write a program that prompts the user for a string and then proceed to print that string character for character one per line. Now in the past, we would have done so probably with square bracket notation, effectively treating a string is an array of characters. 

But this time, let's instead treat a string for what it really is, a pointer or an address. Specifically, the address of a character, really the address of the first character, in a sequence of characters that we collectively know as a string. 

Let's first declare a string for what it really is, char*. And we'll call it s. And then assign it the return value of get string. 

Let's next do some error checking. If s is null, let's immediately return so that we don't accidentally dereference that null pointer. 

Next, let's iterate over the characters in s as follows. For int, i gets 0. n equals the string length of s. Do this so long as i is less than n. And on each iteration, increment i. 

And what do we want to do on each iteration? Let's now print out on each iteration a single character followed by a new line. Well, what character do we want to print? I propose that we go to the address that equals the sum of s plus i. 

Now, why that expression? Well, recall that stored in s is the address of the first character in our string, s. Meanwhile, i is being incremented on each iteration so that it starts at 0, then goes to 1, then goes to 2. 

So in other words, s plus i effectively represents the address of the i-th character in s. So if we go to that address by way of the * operator, we'll be going to the i-th character in the string. And that's the value that will be substituted for our placeholder, percent C. 

Let's confirm as much. Let's save, compile, and run this program. Make pointers, dot slash pointers. And now I'll give it a string like hello. Enter. 

And indeed, I see H-E-L-L-O, with each char on its own line.