Array of structs and new / delete

Question

I have a struct like this:

class Items 
{
private:
    struct item
    {
        unsigned int a, b, c;
    };
    item* items[MAX_ITEMS];
}

Answer 1

Say I wanted to 'delete' an item, like so:

items[5] = NULL;

I know little Visual Basic, but that smells like a Visual Basic programming idiom, since "Set a = None" (or Null, I'm not sure) would delete the object pointed by a (or rather decrement its reference count, for COM objects).

---

As somebody else noted, you should use either:

delete items[5];
items[5] = newContent;

or:

delete items[5];
items[5] = NULL;

After delete[5], the only possible use of the pointer stored in items[5] is causing you trouble. What's worse is that it might happen to work at the beginning, and start failing only when you allocate something else over the space previously used by *items[5]. Those are the causes which make C/C++ programming "interesting", i.e. really annoying (even for who likes C like me).

Writing just delete items[5]; saves what can be an useless write, but that's a premature optimization.