Question

I am working on a project as a homework for my university course of Systems Programming.
I got really confused with the matter of Pointers, Vectors, stacks and heaps.

Using C++.
I have to get a vector of objects which are courses, and those courses objects have several different fields.
What I did was this:

vector<CoursesObject> coursevector;

and then I created my Courses Object class, which contains the space left in course and name of course fields.
Now I want to add a new course, I do:

CoursesObject *theCourse = new CoursesObject(name, space);

now I want to add it to the handler vector:

coursevector.push_back(*theCourse);

With all I know, I created a vector of Courses objects on the stack, and made a new pointer to a new course that is on the heap, and added to the handler vector the pointer theCourse that points to the course object in the heap. Is what I said correct?

When I try to delete those course objects, I do:

for(int i=0; i<coursevector.size(); i++)
    delete coursevector.at(i);

which gives me an error that it is not a pointer. But haven’t I added to the coursevector a POINTER to the course object?

Please somebody explain, I have to handle the memory correctly and it seems that I am not getting it right.

Answer 1

You do not need to use new at all.

//This vector stores CoursesObject objects,
//not pointers to CoursesObjects.
vector<CoursesObject> coursevector;
//Construct theCourse with automatic storage
//duration.
CoursesObject theCourse(name, space);
//Copy theCourse into coursevector
coursevector.push_back(theCourse);
//theCourse will be automatically destroyed.
//coursevector (and all the objects that it contains)
//will be automatically destroyed.