OneAndOneIs2

First of all, you should never use gets. Let me quote from the man page for gets.

"Never use gets()."

Arrays do not have any more protection from buffer overruns than pointers do. If you try to write outside the bounds of an array, the write will work, and it'll probably write over something important in the stack (like the address in the calling function where the current function will return).

In the pointer example, I believe what you are actually doing is changing the target address of the pointer. Both "foobar" and "FooBar" will end up in your executable somewhere, and they will be mapped to some read-only section of memory when your program is loaded. They exist as long as your program is running; nothing you do under normal circumstances creates or destroys them. When you assign to the pointer, you are changing the target address of your pointer to the address of one of those strings.

In most cases, when you use pointers you need to be very aware of how much memory you have allocated, how it will be deallocated, and how you can make sure it will last as long as you need it. A lot of weird bugs and memory leaks come from messing up this sort of thing, and other languages (like java or python) are considered "safer" because they are immune to this problem.

Interesting, I hadn't realized there were man pages for functions. But I've read it now, and it does indeed have that quote in it. Bizzare :o)

At the moment, I'm making my way through the beginner's book of C - it's explaining the language fairly well (tho I'm not impressed by the intro. to arrays and pointers, I must say) but it's not in any way getting into technical matters yet.

I've got "The C programming language" sitting on my table waiting for me to start on next, and I'm making my way through the "Learning GNU C" online book now & then as well.

Hopefully once I've made it through all of those, I'll know enough to avoid memory leaks & buffer overruns.

Cheers for the comment!

I'm fairly certain that:

char foo[] = "foobar";
foo = "Foobar";


does not chage the array in place, if it works at all it will change where the array is pointing to (arrays and pointers are almost totaly interchangable)