How much damage could I accidentally do with pointers?

[Art Vandelay]

I'm trying to learn C because I feel like it'll be useful, and I don't really see the point to object oriented C++ yet.

 

C seems to require pointers to do a lot of things, and I'm probably going to accidentally mess up an algorithm, causing the wrong memory address to be written to.

 

How much damage could this potentially cause? Is it enough to justify doing everything in a VM?

 

When I start learning assembly, I'm gonna get out a VM lol.

[Flojer0]

As far as I know all reasonably modern operating systems will protect from any dangerous memory access. So you should be fine. I've never had any problems, just thrown a few fatal errors at run time.

[Ciccioo]

zero risk

your program will just crash, or not work properly

same for assembler

this is because your program doesn't really "see" the memory, but it uses a "virtual memory", it's like every executable has its own sandbox

there are ways to access memory outside of the sandbox, but you need more privileges and anyway it's not done via pointers, it's done via dedicated functions

[Sundanc3]

The kernel only has the privilege level to do something serious. Your program will just crash if you point to some section of memory out of its scope. 

[Evolas]

Pretty much what everyone else is saying...your program will just crash during run time.  Just make sure your remember to deallocate memory on the heap in your programs.  You must also be weary of dangling pointers - a pointer that is pointing to memory that is no longer allocated in your program. 

 

Also, I don't know why you would find no point in learning C++ for OOP design.  C++ has made outstanding improvements to the C language through its additions to class modeling.  In addition, OOP is very popular in modern programming languages today; so it certainly isn't pointless to learn at some point. 

[Art Vandelay]

Also, I don't know why you would find no point in learning C++ for OOP design.  C++ has made outstanding improvements to the C language through its additions to class modeling.  In addition, OOP is very popular in modern programming languages today; so it certainly isn't pointless to learn at some point. 

For everything I'm doing, there doesn't seem to be a point in using OOP for anything I'm doing. When I get futher into university, I might find things where it makes more sense to use.

[Ciccioo]

For everything I'm doing, there doesn't seem to be a point

did you mean: "there doesn't seem to be a pointer"

ha!

ha ha!

ahhh...

alright... nevermind

[Art Vandelay]

did you mean: "there doesn't seem to be a pointer"

ha!

ha ha!

ahhh...

alright... nevermind

[Avratz]

C is the greatest language. Good choice.

 

As for OOP, it's perfectly possible to implement basic OO design in C. It just lacks the syntactic sugar.

 

There's a free book on it http://www.cs.rit.edu/~ats/books/ooc.pdf

 

Not exactly light reading, but interesting nonetheless.