Of pointers and references........
About two and a half years ago, i would have never imagined myself writing anything about pointers or let alone be at a stage where i am no longer intimidated by them, but here i am blogging about using them. This is after almost 2 years of disliking it......well 2 years to actually get the hang of it and use them properly and honestly it now makes so much sense and i get an idea of the power of unmanaged code (of course when done properly). Coming from the managed world (Java, Python and to some extent C#), it was quite a task for me to get grips with managing memory, even now i won't say i have mastered the art of memory management in C++, but i am reasonably comfortable with it. The point i am trying to make is, watching out for memory isn't second nature to my programming style....I still need to be on absolute alert when i am writing any C++ code, especially when i am passing pointers around the code. However having said all of that, writing some C++ code in vim,...