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Comments on What is undefined behavior and how does it work?

Post

What is undefined behavior and how does it work?

+11
−0

I have created this sensational program:

#include <stdio.h>

int* func (void)
{
  int local=5;
  return &local;
}

int main (void)
{
  printf("%d\n", *func());
}

This prints 5 even though I'm returning a pointer to a local variable. It did not produce an error!

And then I made another sensational program:

int main (void)
{
  int arr[5] = {1,2,3,4,5};
  for(int i=0; i<10; i++)
  {
    printf("%d ", arr[i]);
  }
}

It did not produce an error! But it prints 1 2 3 4 5 and then some other stuff.

I was told that these cases where examples of "undefined behavior" and that we aren't allowed to write code like that.

But it works! The compiler did not protest, the OS didn't give me a "segmentation fault" and nothing bad happened. Isn't some sort of error supposed to happen when we do things like these?

What is this "undefined behavior" and who is responsible for taking care of it?

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1 comment thread

Does it happen to C# also? (2 comments)
Does it happen to C# also?
Anonymous‭ wrote over 3 years ago

Who were teaching me Java he said this thing but, I couldn't understand him. He said there's similar kind of problem in C and, C++ that's why he prefers Java. Is it good to practice C++ with these kind of problem? If not, than I was thinking to try more better language where I won't face this kind of error? Does It happen to C# either?

Lundin‭ wrote over 3 years ago

Anonymous‭ C (and C++) doesn't have much in the way of program safety. They leave that to the programmer. This is one of the reasons why C is so much faster and suitable for hardware-related programming. More freedom, but more things that can go wrong. You can't really compare it against Java or C# because they are used for different things.