In ABAP programs, field symbols are placeholders for existing fields. A field symbol does not physically reserve space for a field, but points to a field which is not known until runtime of the program. Field symbols are comparable to the concept of pointers as used in the programming language C (i.e. pointers to which the contents operator * is applied). In ABAP, however, there is no real equivalent to pointers in the sense of variables which contain a memory address and can be used without the contents operator. You can only work with the data object to which a field symbol points.

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