Hello Neil!

Replying to a message of Neil Heller to Darin McBride:

 NH>> The targets of the pointers still exist ... but where?  Do I
 NH>> need to  worry about "free"ing or
"delete"ing the memory?

 DM>> No.  You didn't malloc/strdup/call any function to allocate 
 DM>> the memory, so neither should you (or can you!) free/call 
 DM>> any function to de-allocate the memory.

 NH> Is there any chance of having a memory leak when using

 NH> char *foo "For whom the bell tolls";

char *foo = "For whom the tell bolls";

No.  If you try to confuse it, it won't work.

void a1()
{
char *foo = "here I am";
printf("a1 -> [%p] (%p} \n", foo, &foo);
foo = "now there";
}

void a2()
{
int useless;
a1();
}

void a3()
{
float more_useless;
a2();
a1();
}

int main()
{
a1(); a2(); a3();
}

Each time should show foo being the same [pointer], but will itself be
located in a different (memory address).  That's because it's pointing to
static, read-only, protected, and possibly shared, memory.

Note that even if it is shared, multiple processes would be able to give
different addresses since all memory is virtualised anyway.

There is no memory leak in the above program since there is no
"manual" memory allocation.

Darin

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