Thread: String assignment segmentation fault (core dump)

Absolutely, delete should have been applied. So rather than:

Code:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
        struct node *first;
        first = new struct node;
        first->name ="Hi there";
        cout << first->i;

}

Which neglects the proper book keeping, one should release the memory from the heap prior to to leaving the main function's scope, and it is usually prudent to test that the allocation was successful. Thus a proper implementation would read:

Code:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    struct node *first;
    first = new struct node;

    if(NULL == first)
    {
        // error handling for failed memory allocation....
        cout << "Memory was not allocated." << endl;

        return 1;
    }
    first->name ="Hi there";
    cout << first->i;
    delete first;

    return 0;
}

I apologize about missing that in the previous post.

Best Regards,

New Ink

Kapil,

Originally Posted by kapil1089thekin

1.Do I need to delete each node in a linked list if I get each node'e memory allocation by calling new?

Absolutely yes, doing so will prevent memory leaks, and bad references from making your application unstable.

Originally Posted by kapil1089thekin

2. In that case it will add O(n) time complexity more? right?

I don't believe that we included the memory allocation behaviors when we calculated complexity while I was in algorithm analysis. An algorithm's complexity was associated with the number/frequency of arithmetic and comparison operations which pertained to the task being completed. As far as space efficiency is concerned the answer is a half-hearted yes. The number of operations pertaining to managing the space consumed while executing an algorithm will increase by (at most) a scalar constant of the input size.

This was generally neglected during my course work, and as Levitin, Anany stated in Introduction to The Design & Analysis of Algorithms "...we are after a measure of an algorithm's efficiency, we would like to have a metric that does not depend on [speed of a given computer, quality of the implementation nor the compiler generating the machine code]...." (p44) In fact, he suggests that "[the] thing to do is to identify the most important operation of the algorithm, called the basic operation, the operation contributing the most to the total running time, and compute the number of times the basic operation is executed." (p44) He arrived at that suggestion after examining the possibility of counting the number times each of the algorithm's operations are executing using counters and a such things which is often unnecessary.

There is not much algorithm associated with your example, so I suppose that the additional comparison, to test that allocation is successful, does add a notable amount of time complexity (i.e. 1*the number of nodes) .

Originally Posted by kapil1089thekin

3.Is there any better solution for freeing the memory?

The new & delete operators are C++'s interface for the memory heap. I'm not sure how you mean "better," but they are the primary tools for manipulating memory consumed/release during to course of a program's execution.

Best Regards,

New Ink -- Henry

@new_ink2001:
The standard new (that is, none overloaded and the usual not-nothrow version of new) doesn't return NULL but rather throws an exception (std::bad_alloc) when the allocation failed. So in your case, the check for NULL is useless. However, you might want to wrap the code in a try catch block unless you don't care about the program crashing on a failed allocation (in this case you shouldn't bother).