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  • What is the difference between a pointer and bucket pointer?

  • What is bucket pointer in C/C++?

  • What are the advantages and drawbacks of using them?

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"Bucket pointer" has no special meaning. It's probably a pointer to a bucket. Whatever a bucket is. Depends on the context. –  Jon Apr 23 '12 at 14:07
@Jon google finds some hits. For instance here: stackoverflow.com/questions/2708448/… –  Ivaylo Strandjev Apr 23 '12 at 14:07
@izomorphius I think what Google find here is just noise: e.g., llvm.org/docs/doxygen/html/FoldingSet_8cpp_source.html is just a pointer to a bucket, and I even find something refer to drawing tools. 5520 results does not seem convincing that this is some special thing, or is it? –  Ziyao Wei Apr 23 '12 at 14:09

1 Answer 1

up vote 10 down vote accepted

Usually the term bucket refers to a subcontainer in a hash table or hash container. Elements that have the same hash code are stored in the same bucket. A bucket could be implemented as a pointer to some storage such as a raw array, the head of a linked list, or a pointer to an implementation class. A pointer could be a pointer to anything - a variable, an object, a variable, ... etc..

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@Fred Nice article link. Thx. –  emsr Apr 23 '12 at 14:23
@Fred,ensr Thanks. I will read the webpage documentation –  Ravi May 8 '12 at 14:28

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