Suppose that a function dynamically allocates a block of memory with a local pointer variable p pointing to the allocated block. Suppose further that there are no other pointers referencing that block of memory, and the function returns without doing a delete on p. Then
A) the pointer p becomes a dangling pointer.
B) the compiler will automatically deallocate the memory pointed to by p.
C) the program will suffer from memory leaks.
D) the returning function will throw the bad_alloc exception.
E) None of the above

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Since the function does not delete the allocated memory and there are no other pointers referencing it, the memory will not be deallocated and will result in a memory leak. The pointer p will become a dangling pointer, but this alone does not solve the problem of memory leak. The compiler does not automatically deallocate memory allocated through dynamic allocation, and bad_alloc exception is thrown when there is a failure to allocate memory, which is not the case in this scenario.

Suppose That a Function Dynamically Allocates a Block of Memory