What happens to an address after delete operator has been applied to it in C++?

Question

If I delete a pointer as follows for example:

delete myPointer;

And, after that did not assign 0 to the pointer as follows:

myPointer = 0; //skipped this

Will myPointer be pointing to another memory address?

Answer 1

No, in most implementations it will store the same address as previously - delete usually doesn't change the address and unless you assign a new address value it remains unchanged. However this is not always guaranteed.

Don't forget, that doing anything except assigning a null pointer or another valid pointer to an already deleted pointer is undefined behavior - your program might crash or misbehave otherwise.

Answer 2

myPointer would be pointing to the same memory address. But, it wouldn't be valid for you to use the memory at that address because delete would have given it back to the runtime/operating system, and the operating system my have allocated that memory for use by something else.