pointer question

[egraves(at)socrates.Berkeley.EDU (Ted Graves)]

Hi all,

Another lurker question ... let's say you define a pointer using the PTR_NEW
function and assign to a variable x.  As long as you keep track of x and don't
reassign x and lose the pointer to the heap variable, things are great.  You
can remove the heap variable from memory using the PTR_FREE procedure.

But now let's say i have a function TEST that takes a pointer as an argument,
and i want to create a pointer on the fly to use in TEST.  So i do something
like

result = TEST(PTR_NEW(value))

where value is whatever i want the heap variable to be. What happens to the
heap variable assigned in this statement after TEST returns?  I'm assuming
from that because of the way it was created, a heap variable now exists that i
can't easily get rid of without using HEAP_GC.

Me and my sloppy programming ...




Ted Graves
Magnetic Resonance Science Center, UCSF