Re: Using reserved space in a vector defined?

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sat, 9 Jan 2010 05:13:08 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<10fe71e4-909b-4e29-a030-4feea5fe594f@h9g2000yqa.googlegroups.com>
On Jan 8, 5:07 pm, Juha Nieminen <nos...@thanks.invalid> wrote:

James Kanze wrote:

On Jan 4, 9:32 pm, Andy Champ <no....@nospam.invalid> wrote:

Fred Zwarts wrote:

Is there a reason to think that there are environments
were this does not work? Is there another way to resize
the buffer, without initializing all new elements?


It will work fine in all compliant environments.


It's undefined behavior. Although in practice, it's
difficult to imagine an implementation where it wouldn't
work, there's certainly no guarantee that it will work, and
there is a guarantee that anyone reading the code will be
thoroughly confused.


"Undefined behavior" means that the compiler can add boundary
checks to the vector indexing, which some compilers do in
debug mode. Thus the program will fail if you try to index
out-of-bounds, even if it would be on reserved space. Thus you
cannot trust that the trick will work with all compilers in
all configurations.


If I understood correctly, however, he's using the [] operator
on the address returned by &v[0]. I'm not too sure of the
standard here; I sort of think that such checks would have to
involve the underlying allocated memory, and not what vector
knows about it. (On the other hand, vector is free to do
whatever it wants with that underlying memory, e.g. overwrite it
with nonsense patterns in every function. I just can't imagine
an implementation which does, however.)

--
James Kanze

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