I was wondering when you code something likeWhere does the the memory come from to allocate space for 100, I saw a professor say it just finds a 100 in memory and points to it but that sounds like bologna.Code:int *ptr;
*ptr=100;
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I was wondering when you code something likeWhere does the the memory come from to allocate space for 100, I saw a professor say it just finds a 100 in memory and points to it but that sounds like bologna.Code:int *ptr;
*ptr=100;
In the above example, ptr is not pointing to "anything in particular", meaning that the code will attempt to put the value 100 in some random place. It depends on many different things what actually happens:
Alternatives are:
Is ptr a global variable? If so, it's initialized to zero, so you'll attempt to write 100 to address zero, which is a protected location in most modern OS's.
Is ptr a local variable in a function? If so, it will take the value that happens to be where that variable is stored on the applications stack - which can be just about anything - a common value is some other stack-address or "a text-string" - the latter leads to errors such as "application blah attempted to access memory at "0x41722038".
Some compilers generate code so that it can detect that you're trying to access an uninitialized pointer, but most of the time, it will just do something random - and it may or may not crash the application (or if you do this in a driver or kernel-code, crash the entire system!). It may even depend on what else is going on in the application - one call to the function works fine, another call from a different place, and it crashes.
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Mats