My book's front cover

Here’s a preview image of my book’s cover. Most of the Manning book covers use images from the 1805 edition of Sylvain MarŽchal’s four-volume compendium of regional dress customs. You can read more on that here.

And no, that’s not the Pope! That’s what my wife jokingly asked me when she saw the cover.

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You *can* delete a NULL pointer!

This is an often asked question in newsgroups and forums.

A lot of people do this :-

if(p)
    delete p;

The assumption is that, if they do not check for NULL, delete will result in a crash or in random behavior. This is not correct. C++ guarantees that a delete will do nothing if the pointer is NULL. See entry [16.8] on http://www.parashift.com/c++-faq-lite/freestore-mgmt.html.

It’s the same for managed code. You do not have to check for nullptr. Consider the following code :

int main()
{
    R^ r = nullptr;
    delete r;
}

The generated IL checks to see if the object supports IDisposable, and if so, it calls Dispose on it. And if your object implements IDisposable, which in C++/CLI means that you have a destructor, there will be a Dispose generated for you. Note that, Dispose will not be called if the object is a nullptr.

So, in summary, irrespective of whether you are using native objects or CLI objects, you *can* delete a NULL pointer.

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