Every program has a pool of available memory it can use during program execution to hold dynamically allocated objects. This pool of available memory is referred to as the program's free store or heap. C programs use a pair of functions named malloc and free to allocate space from the free store. In C++ we use new and delete expressions.
A variable of array type has three important limitations: Its size is fixed, the size must be known at compile time, and the array exists only until the end of the block in which it was defined. Real-world programs usually cannot live with these restrictionsthey need a way to allocate an array dynamically at run time. Although all arrays have fixed size, the size of a dynamically allocated array need not be fixed at compile time. It can be (and usually is) determined at run time. Unlike an array variable, a dynamically allocated array continues to exist until it is explicitly freed by the program.
