A far pointer is, in a Segmented architecture computer, a pointer which includes a segment number, making it possible to point to addresses outside of the current segment. It has been suggested that wild pointer be merged into this article or section. ... On the Intel x86 architecture, a memory segment is the portion of memory which may be addressed by a single index register without changing a 16-bit segment selector. ...

For example, in an Intel 8086, where an ordinary pointer is just a 16-bit offset within an implied segment, a far pointer has two parts, a 16 bits segment value and a 16 bits offset value. A linear address is obtained by left shifting the segment value four times, and add the offset value. Hence the effective address is 20 bits. Comparison and arithmetic on far pointers are problematic; there are potentially sixteen different segmend:offset address pairs that points to the same address. In order to compare two pointers, they must be converted to their 20 bits linear representation. An Intel 8086 Microprocessor The 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel in 1978, which gave rise to the x86 architecture. ...

On 8086 C compilers, far pointers were so declared with a non-standard far qualifier. For example, "char far *p;" defined a far pointer to a char. The chore of normalisation of far pointers could be circumvened with the non-standard huge qualifier. The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the... Jump to: navigation, search A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language compiler. ... Char may mean: A piece of charred substance A character Certain fish in the genus Salvelinus The Char 2C, a tank Char (StarCraft) Tea This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...