Question

I am just curious about C++/CLI handle(^) and how it works. For e.g:

The first thing that I cannot understand is, over here the accepted answer says that the caret is the managed equivalent of a * (pointer). However, unlike *, I can directly assign value to ^.

int ^num;
num = 4;

This would not work in C++:

int *num2;
num2 = new int[1];
num2 = 10;

Why is this behavior observed?
Also, in Microsoft Webpage they say you cannot point to a member of the object, and it does not support pointer arithmetic. So both the following code snippet would fail to compile

int ^num3 = gcnew int[10];

for(int i = 0; i<10; i++)
    %(num3 + i) = i

or

for(int i = 0; i<10; i++)
    (num3 + i) = i

Why???

That brings me to final question: What would be equivalent of following int native/normal C++ code snippet in C++/CLI?

int *array1;
array1 = new int[ 10];

for( int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
     *(array1 + i ) = i;

Answer 1

^ is the equivalent of *, for the purposes of dealing with class objects (new/gcnew, passing as parameters, storing as part of a class definition, etc). Pointer arithmetic isn’t the same in C++/CLI.

Here’s the equivalent to your code snippet:

array<int>^ array1;
array1 = gcnew array<int>(10);

for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
    array1[i] = i;

array<int>^: This is a managed reference, stored on the stack.

array1 = gcnew array<int>(10): This is creating a managed object (from the class named “array”) on the managed heap, and assigning the reference to the local variable on the stack.

array1[i] = i: Behind the scenes, this calls a method on the “array” class, passing it the index and the new value (both i in this case).