why pointers???????????

I have done very little Java 0r C or C++ programming but I think after working with languages like assembler, you find that using and understanding pointers requires fairly in depth knowledge and understanding of the language and the way computers work and how data is stored and processed in memory.

If the interviewer feels that you are comfortable discussing pointers than you will be able to contribute. (personal theory)

I can only relate this in vb for which I'm more familiar with. There will always come a time when we need to interact with external programs, maybe to enhance processing speed or functions that would be too tedious for us to code ourselves.

One good example of this is in processing images, supposed you want to display a PNG in your application. We would certainly need here a sort of png.dll that require most of the time passing arguments by reference, in C this is termed as pointers. It would be a waste of system resource to make copy of the image always specially for very large one. So we only have one copy and the pointer to it is what we actually pass to an external program for processing. Hope this somehow clears something.

If C language does not have pointer feature, it's application will decreased heavily. I am a linux c programer, and write device driver in C language. It is very important to understanding C pointer,especially in almost all hardware related operation, memory management etc. besides pointer, C cannot accomplish all this task.

You may not require pointers at the basic level of any programming language but as you go deeper into the concepts pointers play a very important role in any program. These concepts include data structures and higher level programs ..So understanding the basic concepts of pointers is necessary