Programming

One needs to know 1 layer too much to know you know enough. It is great that the compiler and linker take care of the alllocation of all the bits, but you should know that 'char *x;' makes one pointer x on the local stack not initialized, 'char *x = "123";' makes a writable initialized character array of 4 bytes on the heap and one pointer x on the stack initialized to point to that array, but 'char x[] = "123" ;' creates a 4 character array on the stack and x is a pointer to it, not stored in run time memory, just known to the compiler. Some things are compile time only, and some are run time.

JAVA and I suppose parts of C# have automatic housekeeping so junk createdon the heap is recycled when all references to it are released. So, 'String x = "123" ;' creates a local String Class reference x and an immutable String object on the heap holding the three characters. If later in the code flow you say 'x = "234" ;', the last reference to "123" is destroyed, so it can be garbage collected, and a new String Object is created on the heap.

In C/C++, if you rewrite your char*, the old char[] is lost in a memory leak.