Mahendra Kathe

• Nov 20th, 2007

 

In 16 bit development environment like DOS or WIN 3.0 memory management is done in terms of segment:offset addressing style. so in this environment we have segment registers like CS,DS.SS,ES if we declare a near pointer we will be able to access the pointer within the segment i.e with 64 kb boundary on the contrary if we declare it as far pointer we can access the pointer across segment boundary i.e pointer declared in one segment can be accessed from other segments also.
In 32 bit environment we have linear addressing scheme no segments and offsets so all pointers are treated as far only, no differentiation as near or far.