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In earlier chapters, variables have been explained as locations in the computer's memory which can be accessed by their identifier (their name). This way, the program does not need to care about the physical address of the data in memory; it simply uses the identifier whenever it needs to refer to the variable.
For a C++ program, the memory of a computer is like a succession of memory cells, each one byte in size, and each with a unique address. These single-byte memory cells are ordered in a way that allows data representations larger than one byte to occupy memory cells that have consecutive addresses.
This way, each cell can be easily located in the memory by means of its unique address. For example, the memory cell with the address 1776
always follows immediately after the cell with address 1775
and precedes the one with 1777
, and is exactly one thousand cells after 776
and exactly one thousand cells before 2776
.
When a variable is declared, the memory needed