constant pointers, a danger?

I have been rereading my C++ book to refresh my memory and I read a section of constant pointers. I know that to disarm stray pointers after calling 'delete' on them, you set them to null, that is the memory address of 0. However, constant pointers cannot have their address changed. Does that mean after I call 'delete' on a constant pointer, I now have a constant stray pointer? Can I even call 'delete' at all on constant pointers?

My book didn't seem to answer this...

You can call delete on a constant pointer -- but you can't change its value, as you mentioned, so you can't set it to NULL and you also can't use new to reuse the pointer, so it's just going to basically sit there and do nothing after that.

I'm finding it hard to imagine a case where it would be a problem.
More often you have a pointer to a constant int:

Code:

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const int *p

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than you have a const pointer to int:

Code:

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int *const p;

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For the former it's not a problem, p=NULL is just fine. For the later it is almost certainly a local variable in which case just change the declaration to be non-const if you don't want to make things difficult for yourself.

The real answer of course is that you should just use an auto_ptr (for example) anyway, and let it get cleaned up on its own when it goes out of scope.

Works for me. Thanks!