Chapter 11 Overview

Many problem solutions require that a significant amount of information be represented. These tasks can be accomplished with C++ mechanisms that provide for the dynamic creation and management of objects during run time. Such mechanisms allow programs to be flexible and to represent arbitrarily sized data instances. Dynamic objects are created using the new operator and are returned to the system using the delete operator. Access to a dynamic object is through a pointer, where a pointer is an object whose value is the location of another object. Pointers have similarities to iterators. In fact, an iterator can be viewed as a pointer abstraction. To support pointers, C++ provides two complementary operators—the address operator & and the dereferencing operator *. The address operator allows the location of an object to be computed, and the dereferencing operator allows the value stored at a location to be computed. Our discussion begins with pointers.

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