Re: pointer question

[Reimar Bauer <r.bauer(at)fz-juelich.de>]

Ted Graves wrote:
> 
> 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


We have a routine in our library which I am using often in this case.

http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg1/idl_icglib/idl_source/idl_html/dbase/download/rec_ptr_free.tar.gz



For further routines and licensing please look at
http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg1/idl_icglib/idl_lib_intro.html

regards 

Reimar

-- 
Reimar Bauer 

Institut fuer Stratosphaerische Chemie (ICG-1)
Forschungszentrum Juelich
email: R.Bauer@fz-juelich.de
http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg1/
=============================================
a IDL library at ForschungsZentrum Jülich
http://www.fz-juelich.de/icg/icg1/idl_icglib/idl_lib_intro.html

http://www.fz-juelich.de/zb/text/publikation/juel3786.html