int (*ptr)[3]=new int [1][3];
I understand that int (*ptr)[3] creates a pointer to a 3-element integer-holding array.
I understand that new int [1][3] dynamically allocates some memory of size 1 row x 3 col x 4 bytes (32-bit machine) = 12 bytes.
I also understand that ptr [0] = &ptr [0] in this case.
The total memory allocated here is 3 * 12 bytes. Why?
Why is the 3 on the LHS dependent on the 3 on the RHS? If we use 3 on the RHS, we have to use 3 on the LHS. I cannot use 2 or 4.
Maybe it's a trivial logic, but I don't seem to find good literature on this.
First, the total memory allocated is not 3*12 bytes. It's
3*1*sizeof(int) + k bytes, where k is unspecified (but in
most implementations, will be 0 when allocating arrays of
int).
Second, the two 3 must be equal because they are part of the
type. On the left, the type is "pointer to 3 int". On the
right, you are allocating an "array of 1 array of 3 int";
because of the semantics of array new, the type of the
expression is point to array of 3 int (and any information
concerning whether it was int[1][3] or int[2][3] or whatever
has been lost). C++ uses static type checking (for the most
part), so the compiler must know all parts of the type at
compile time.
Given the information you have provided so far, I can only answer the second part of your question:
Why is the 3 on the LHS dependent on the 3 on the RHS?
int (*ptr)[3] // creates a pointer to an array of 3 ints
that means your variable ptr should point to an array of array of length threes only and when you are writing new int [1][3], you are essentially creating an array of length threes with one row(2-D array) only. Similarly new int [2][3] would give you an array of threes with two rows.(2-D array) That's why both of the threes are dependent on each other.
Related
Value of a pointer is address of a variable. Why value of an int pointer increased by 4-bytes after the int pointer increased by 1.
In my opinion, I think value of pointer(address of variable) only increase by 1-byte after pointer increment.
Test code:
int a = 1, *ptr;
ptr = &a;
printf("%p\n", ptr);
ptr++;
printf("%p\n", ptr);
Expected output:
0xBF8D63B8
0xBF8D63B9
Actually output:
0xBF8D63B8
0xBF8D63BC
EDIT:
Another question - How to visit the 4 bytes an int occupies one by one?
When you increment a T*, it moves sizeof(T) bytes.† This is because it doesn't make sense to move any other value: if I'm pointing at an int that's 4 bytes in size, for example, what would incrementing less than 4 leave me with? A partial int mixed with some other data: nonsensical.
Consider this in memory:
[↓ ]
[...|0 1 2 3|0 1 2 3|...]
[...|int |int |...]
Which makes more sense when I increment that pointer? This:
[↓ ]
[...|0 1 2 3|0 1 2 3|...]
[...|int |int |...]
Or this:
[↓ ]
[...|0 1 2 3|0 1 2 3|...]
[...|int |int |...]
The last doesn't actually point an any sort of int. (Technically, then, using that pointer is UB.)
If you really want to move one byte, increment a char*: the size of of char is always one:
int i = 0;
int* p = &i;
char* c = (char*)p;
char x = c[1]; // one byte into an int
†A corollary of this is that you cannot increment void*, because void is an incomplete type.
Pointers are increased by the size of the type they point to, if the pointer points to char, pointer++ will increment pointer by 1, if it points to a 1234 bytes struct, pointer++ will increment the pointer by 1234.
This may be confusing first time you meet it, but actually it make a lot of sense, this is not a special processor feature, but the compiler calculates it during compilation, so when you write pointer+1 the compiler compiles it as pointer + sizeof(*pointer)
As you said, an int pointer points to an int. An int usually takes up 4 bytes and therefore, when you increment the pointer, it points to the "next" int in the memory - i.e., increased by 4 bytes. It acts this way for any size of type. If you have a pointer to type A, then incrementing a A* it will increment by sizeof(A).
Think about it - if you only increment the pointer by 1 byte, than it will point to a middle of an int and I can't think of an opportunity where this is desired.
This behavior is very comfortable when iterating over an array, for example.
The idea is that after incrementing, the pointer points to the next int in memory. Since ints are 4 bytes wide, it is incremented by 4 bytes. In general, a pointer to type T will increment by sizeof(T)
A pointer points at the BEGINNING of something in memory. An INT occupies 4 bytes (32bit) and a DOUBLE occupies 8 bytes (64bit) in memory. So if you have a DOUBLE number stored, and you wish at a very low level pointing to the next available memory location, the pointer wooud be increased by 8 bytes. If for some reason you pointed at +4bytes from the start of a DOUBLE value, you would corrupt it's value. Memory is a very large flat field that has no conscience of itself, so it's up to the software to divides it properly and to "respect the borders" of items located in that field.
I have a question about pointers, and memory addresses:
Supposing I have the following code:
int * array = (int *) malloc(sizeof(int) * 4);
Now in array im storing a memory address, I know that c++ takes already care when adding +1 to this pointer it will add 4 bytes, but what If I want to add manually 4 bytes?
array + 0x004
If im correct this will lead to add 4*4 (16) bytes, but my Idea is to add manually those 4 bytes.
Why? Just playing around, i've tried this and I got a totally different result from what I expected, then i've researched and i've seen that c++ takes already care when you add +1 to a pointer (it sums 4 bytes in this case).
Any idea?
For a pointer p to a type T with value v, the expression p+n will (on most systems anyway) result in a pointer to the address v+n*sizeof(T). To get a fixed-byte offset to the pointer, you can first cast it to a character pointer, like this:
reinterpret_cast<T*>(reinterpret_cast<char*>(p) + n)
In c++, sizeof(char) is defined to be equal to 1.
Do note that accessing improperly aligned values can have large performance penalties.
Another thing to note is that, in general, casting pointers to different types is not allowed (called the strict aliasing rule), but an exception is explicitly made for casting any pointer type to char* and back.
The trick is convert the type of array into any pointer-type with a size of 1 Byte, or store the pointer value in an integer.
#include <stdint.h>
int* increment_1(int* ptr) {
//C-Style
return (int*)(((char*)ptr) + 4);
}
int* increment_2(int* ptr) {
//C++-Style
char* result = reinterpret_cast<char*>(ptr);
result += 4;
return reinterpret_cast<int*>(result);
}
int* increment_3(int* ptr) {
//Store in integer
intptr_t result = reinterpret_cast<intptr_t>(ptr);
result += 4;
return reinterpret_cast<int*>(result);
}
Consider that if you add an arbitrary number of bytes to an address of an object of type T, it no longer makes sense to use a pointer of type T, since there might not be an object of type T at the incremented memory address.
If you want to access a particular byte of an object, you can do so using a pointer to a char, unsigned char or std::byte. Such objects are the size of a byte, so incrementing behaves just as you would like. Furthermore, while rules of C++ disallow accessing objects using incompatible pointers, these three types are excempt of that rule and are allowed to access objects of any type.
So, given
int * array = ....
You can access the byte at index 4 like this:
auto ptr = reinterpret_cast<unsigned char*>(array);
auto byte_at_index_4 = ptr + 4;
array + 0x004
If im correct this will lead to add 4*4 (16) bytes
Assuming sizeof(int) happens to be 4, then yes. But size of int is not guaranteed to be 4.
Here is the problem program:
#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
int apricot[2][3][5];
int (*r)[5]=apricot[0];
int *t=apricot[0][0];
printf("%p\n%p\n%p\n%p\n",r,r+1,t,t+1);
}
The output of it is:
# ./a.out
0xbfa44000
0xbfa44014
0xbfa44000
0xbfa44004
I think t's dimension's value should be 5 because t is the last dimension,and the fact is matched(0xbfa44004-0xbfa44000+1=5)
But the r's dimension's value is 0xbfa44014-0xbfa44000+1=21,I think it should be 3*5=15,because 3 and 5 are the last two dimensions,then why the difference is 21?
r is a pointer to an array of 5 ints.
Assuming 1 int is 4 bytes on your system (from t and t+1), then "stepping" that pointer by 1 (r+1) means an increase in 5*4 = 20 bytes. Which is what you get here.
You get tricked by the C syntax. r is an array pointer to an array of int, t is a plain int pointer. When doing any kind of pointer arithmetic, you do it in the unit pointed at.
Thus t+1 means the address of t + the size of one pointed-at object. Since t points at int and int is 4 bytes on your system, you get an address 4 bytes from t.
The same rule applies to r. It is a pointer to an array of 5 int. When you do pointer arithmetic on it by r+1, you get the size of the pointed-at object, which has size 5*sizeof(int), which happens to be 20 bytes on your computer. So therefore r+1 gives you an address 20 bytes (==14 hex) from r.
I'm reading a lecture slide in my data structures class for arrays, but there is something that sort of confused me.
The example is in an array called x, defined as follows:
1-dimensional array x = [a, b, c, d]
location(x[i]) = start + i
I'm not really understanding this, so could somebody explain this?
start is a variable, which holds address to the array. Since a pointer in 32-bit system has 4 bytes, it will occupy these four bytes. So if you want 4-byte array, you will actually need 8 bytes of memory: 4 for the array and another 4 for pointer to the first element of this array.
Value of a pointer is address of a variable. Why value of an int pointer increased by 4-bytes after the int pointer increased by 1.
In my opinion, I think value of pointer(address of variable) only increase by 1-byte after pointer increment.
Test code:
int a = 1, *ptr;
ptr = &a;
printf("%p\n", ptr);
ptr++;
printf("%p\n", ptr);
Expected output:
0xBF8D63B8
0xBF8D63B9
Actually output:
0xBF8D63B8
0xBF8D63BC
EDIT:
Another question - How to visit the 4 bytes an int occupies one by one?
When you increment a T*, it moves sizeof(T) bytes.† This is because it doesn't make sense to move any other value: if I'm pointing at an int that's 4 bytes in size, for example, what would incrementing less than 4 leave me with? A partial int mixed with some other data: nonsensical.
Consider this in memory:
[↓ ]
[...|0 1 2 3|0 1 2 3|...]
[...|int |int |...]
Which makes more sense when I increment that pointer? This:
[↓ ]
[...|0 1 2 3|0 1 2 3|...]
[...|int |int |...]
Or this:
[↓ ]
[...|0 1 2 3|0 1 2 3|...]
[...|int |int |...]
The last doesn't actually point an any sort of int. (Technically, then, using that pointer is UB.)
If you really want to move one byte, increment a char*: the size of of char is always one:
int i = 0;
int* p = &i;
char* c = (char*)p;
char x = c[1]; // one byte into an int
†A corollary of this is that you cannot increment void*, because void is an incomplete type.
Pointers are increased by the size of the type they point to, if the pointer points to char, pointer++ will increment pointer by 1, if it points to a 1234 bytes struct, pointer++ will increment the pointer by 1234.
This may be confusing first time you meet it, but actually it make a lot of sense, this is not a special processor feature, but the compiler calculates it during compilation, so when you write pointer+1 the compiler compiles it as pointer + sizeof(*pointer)
As you said, an int pointer points to an int. An int usually takes up 4 bytes and therefore, when you increment the pointer, it points to the "next" int in the memory - i.e., increased by 4 bytes. It acts this way for any size of type. If you have a pointer to type A, then incrementing a A* it will increment by sizeof(A).
Think about it - if you only increment the pointer by 1 byte, than it will point to a middle of an int and I can't think of an opportunity where this is desired.
This behavior is very comfortable when iterating over an array, for example.
The idea is that after incrementing, the pointer points to the next int in memory. Since ints are 4 bytes wide, it is incremented by 4 bytes. In general, a pointer to type T will increment by sizeof(T)
A pointer points at the BEGINNING of something in memory. An INT occupies 4 bytes (32bit) and a DOUBLE occupies 8 bytes (64bit) in memory. So if you have a DOUBLE number stored, and you wish at a very low level pointing to the next available memory location, the pointer wooud be increased by 8 bytes. If for some reason you pointed at +4bytes from the start of a DOUBLE value, you would corrupt it's value. Memory is a very large flat field that has no conscience of itself, so it's up to the software to divides it properly and to "respect the borders" of items located in that field.