dereference

I am just starting C++. I am a bit confused about the return type of assignment and dereference operator. I am following the book C++ Primer. At various occasions, the author says that the return type of assignment operator is reference to the type of left hand operand but later on, he says that the return type is the type of the left hand operand. I have referred C++11 Standard Sec. 5.17, where the return type is described as "lvalue referring to left hand operand". Similarly, I can't figure out whether dereference returns the pointed-to object or the reference to the object. Are these

I'm not sure whether or when it is useful (to improve performance) to dereference variables. var x = a.b.c.d[some_key].f; while (loop) { do_something_with(x); } seems to be better than while (loop) { do_somthing_with(a.b.c.d[some_key].f); } Is that needed or is this done automagically by smart JavaScript engines? But my actual question is whether I should do this, for example, in a library. (function() { var slice = Array.prototype.slice; Function.prototype.x = function x() { var args = slice.call(arguments, 0); ... }; })(); or just Function.prototype.x = function x() { var args = Array

I see this question a lot on SO. Maybe not in so many words... but time and again there is confusion on how arrays are different from pointers. So I thought I would take a moment to Q&A a few points about this. For purposes of this Q&A we're going to assume a 32-bit system and the following have been declared: char * ptr = "hello"; char arr[10] = "hello"; int iarr[10] = {0}; Here's a list of questions that surmise the confusion I see on SO. As I see new ones I'll add to my list of Q&A (others feel free to as well, and correct me if you see any mistakes!) Isn't a pointer and an array basically

I read different things on the internet and got confused, because every website says different things. Speaking about C. I read about * referencing operator and & dereferencing operator; or that referencing means making a pointer point to a variable and dereferencing is accessing the value of the variable that the pointer points to. So I got confused. Can I get a simple but thorough explanation about "referencing and de-referencing"? A B Referencing means taking the address of an existing variable (using &) to set a pointer variable. In order to be valid, a pointer has to be set to the address

This question already has an answer here: Why doesn't my program seg fault when I dereference a NULL pointer inside of malloc? 4 answers I've come across a snippet of code that to me should crash with a segmentation fault , and yet it works without a hitch. The code in question plus relevant data structure is as follows (with associated comment found right above): typedef struct { double length; unsigned char nPlaced; unsigned char path[0]; } RouteDefinition* Alloc_RouteDefinition() { // NB: The +nBags*sizeof.. trick "expands" the path[0] array in RouteDefinition // to the path[nBags] array

I am learning C language and quite confused the differences between ++*ptr and *ptr++ . For example: int x = 19; int *ptr = &x; I know ++*ptr and *ptr++ produce different results but I am not sure why is that? templatetypedef These statements produce different results because of the way in which the operators bind. In particular, the prefix ++ operator has the same precedence as * , and they associate right-to-left. Thus ++*ptr is parsed as ++(*ptr) meaning "increment the value pointed at by ptr ,". On the other hand, the postfix ++ operator has higher precedence than the dereferrence operator