Pointer exercises

[swgh]

Does anyone know of any good links to some exercises on Pointers? I have tried google and it always turns up dud pages for me. Ant help appriciated. I have done all the ones in my book and want to do more. I dont want to move on untill I feel I can handle them at a level I am comfortable with.

[robwhit]

What level are you at? Here are some introductory ones:

1. make strcpy without an array, but with pointer arithmetic. make one for wide characters too.
2. make a singly linked list
3. make a double linked list

[Daved]

Look for C exercises.

Or practice not using pointers in C++.

[matsp]

Look for C exercises.

Or practice not using pointers in C++.

Whilst avoiding pointers generally is a good thing, there are plenty of things that get very difficult if you DON'T have pointers. The typical instances include linked lists and trees. Of course, you can implement this by using some standard container class, but it gets a little bit clunky if you HAVE to do it that way every place you need a simple linked list to store things in a queue, stack or list, and the arranging is really simple.

If you haven't done that yet, build a stack as a linked list. Then convert it to a queue.

Once you have that working, you could practice your C++ skills by making it into a template classes, using the same interface as a std::stack, std::queue, std::list, including a basic iterator class.

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Mats

[Daved]

It gets clunky if you don't use standard containers when you need a simple linked list.

But my point was that virtually all the tasks for working with pointers that would be helpful to learn can be found by doing C exercises. So if you look for C exercises you are more likely to find good pointer exercises.

[matsp]

But my point was that virtually all the tasks for working with pointers that would be helpful to learn can be found by doing C exercises. So if you look for C exercises you are more likely to find good pointer exercises.

Yes, I agree with that.

I guess I'm still very much thinking as a kernel programmer, even if much of the code I write right now is user-mode [but still part of the OS services, so it needs to be both efficient, and since it's used in an embedded environment, not too much memory]. Not helped much by the lack of a STL implementation in our world...

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Mats