ABAP Runtime Environment (BC-ABA)

Placeholder for an existing field.

A field symbol does not reserve physical space for a field, but points to a field that is not determined until runtime.

In ABAP, field symbols are comparable with dereferenced pointers in the programming language C. These are pointers to which the content operator * is applied.

In ABAP, there is nothing that corresponds exactly to pointers, that is, variables that contain a memory address and can also be used without the content operator.

You can only use a field symbol with the data object to which the field symbol points.