pointers in C

I have a little problem. way back in high school I took java, and never had to deal with these little things. now, at college, they're making me take C. I don't have anything against it, its just that.. well I'm not entirely sure what pointers are used for, or what they accomplish. would anyone care to elighten me?

>>5
That's C++, not C. And you should return EXIT_SUCCESS rather than 0.
>>6
In Java, there are only pointers to structs, to put it shortly. I like it better than the C++ systems, but C is just fine.

A C pointer contains an address in your memory, just like an index in a array the size of your memory.