I am trying to demonstrate concept of dangling pointer and so writing a program on it.
Suppose if u have pointer as a class variable and u don't write ur own copy constructor then it can lead to concept of dangling pointer.
Implicit copy constructor does a member wise copy of elements(shallow copy).So if one object goes out of scope it leads to problem of dangling pointer.
So is this program which i wrote to demonstrate dangling pointer correct? When i compiled it on ideone.com and it gave a runtime error.
#include"iostream"
using namespace std;
#include<string.h>
class cString
{
int mlen;char* mbuff; //**pointer** is a member of class
public:
cString(char *buff) //copy buff in mbuff
{
mlen=strlen(buff);
mbuff=new char[mlen+1];
strcpy(mbuff,buff);
}
void display() //display mbuff
{
cout<<mbuff;
}
~cString()
{
cout<<"Destructor invoked";
delete[] mbuff; //free memory pointed by mbuff
}
};
int main()
{
cString s1("Hey");
{
cString s2(s1); //call default copy constructor(shallow copy)
s2.display();
} //destructor for object s2 is called here as s2 goes out of scope
s1.display(); //object s1.display() should be unable to display hey
return 0;
}