Delete pointer and object

Question

How do I delete a pointer and the object it's pointing to?

Will the code below delete the object?

Object *apple;
apple = new Object();

delete apple;

And what happens if the pointer is not deleted, and gets out of scope?

Object *apple;
apple = new Object();

This might be a very basic question, but I'm coming from Java.

Answer 1

Your first code snippet does indeed delete the object. The pointer itself is a local variable allocated on the stack. It will be deallocated as soon as it goes out of scope.

That brings up the second point--if the pointer goes out of scope before you deallocate the object you allocated on the heap, you will never be able to deallocate it, and will have a memory leak.

Hope this helps.