In general (across programming languages), a pointer is a number that represents a physical location in memory. A nullpointer is (almost always) one that points to 0, and is widely recognized as "not pointing to anything". Since systems have different amounts of supported memory, it doesn't always take the same number of bytes to hold that number, so we call a "native size integer" one that can hold a pointer on any particular system. - Sam Harwell

In general (across programming languages), a pointer is a number that represents a physical location in memory. A nullpointer is (almost always) one that points to 0, and is widely recognized as "not pointing to anything". Since systems have different amounts of supported memory, it doesn't always take the same number of bytes to hold that number, so we call a "native size integer" one that can hold a pointer on any particular system. - Sam Harwell