So you think you know Pointers?
Posted: Tuesday, May 18, 2004 12:11 AM
by
dave
Filed under: Just for Fun
This might be a bit of fun for the old C programmers out there like me.
A long time ago I used to teach C programming. This was before C++ and Windows. When we used to have to write whole applications that fit into 250K of Ram because the rest of the 640K was used up by various hardware drivers, and DOS, and you had to use tools like Quarterdeck QEMM to move drivers into memory locations above 640K. These were the days when hardware was expensive and developers had to really worry about memory usage and pointers and stacks..... Oh sorry I got a little carried away there, that is not what this Blog is about.
Where was I? Oh yeah I used to teach C, at the end of every test I used to have bonus questions for my students. I found one the other day and thought I would put it on my Blog for fun. This particular bonus question was meant to test their understanding of the pointer operators ( * & ), amoung other things.
Now to use pointers in C#, I had to make the code unsafe. With todays compilers and editors, it would be easy to see what this little method does. So see if you can figure it out just by looking at the code right here in my Blog.
Can you tell me what i will equal, and therefore what will be written to the console.
unsafe static void Foo()
{
int i, k=5; /* Declare some Integers */
int *j; /* Declare a pointer */
j = &k; /* Assign a Value */
i = 10/*j; /* Do the Math */;
Console.WriteLine( i.ToString() );
}
If you are thinking this is too easy, and the answer is 2. Try again.
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