> The following was supposedly scribed by > Sisyphus > on Saturday 24 January 2004 01:22 am:
>That almost makes sense to me ... which is a worry :-) >Anyway, the important thing is that the change works also for me. I'm just getting into the details of C myself, but when trying to manipulate nested Perl arrays and other data structures, you'll spend all of your time pulling out hair if you don't get a good understanding of pointers. this pages seems fairly clear: http://computer.howstuffworks.com/c9.htm An uninitialized pointer points to something random (just like an uninitialized integer usually contains garbage.) Although I'm sure that the memory manager draws a line between the two, assume that the random address stored in the pointer is aimed at your operating system kernel. Storing something into that address means over-writing whatever unfortunate memory happened to be there. When a function wants a pointer as an argument, what you are really giving it is a memory address. With sv_gets(), that address is used as the starting point for storing the line from the file. --Eric -- "Because understanding simplicity is complicated." --Eric Raymond
