far and near pointers in c

What is "far" and "near" pointers in "c" ?
A:“Near" and "far" pointers are actually non-standard qualifiers that you'll find only on x86 systems. They reflect the odd segmentation architecture of Intel processors. In short, a near pointer is an offset only,which refers to an address in a known segment. A far pointer is a compound value, containing both a segment number and an offset into that segment. Segmentation still exists on Intel processors, but it is not used in any of the mainstream 32-bit operating systems developed for them, so you'll generally only find the "near" and "far" keywords in source code developed for Windows 3.x,MS-DOS, Xenix/80286, etc.