Re: Table of pointers question

["björn lundin" <b.f.lundin@gmail.com>]

On 24 Sep, 03:34, Adam Beneschan <a...@irvine.com> wrote:
> The advantages of using an array of pointers is
> that a pointer is smaller than a DirectoryEntryType (and in a real-
> life application, it could be MUCH smaller), so if NumberOfEntries is,
> say, 15, allocating a fixed-size array of 1000 pointers and waiting
> until runtime to allocate 15 DirectoryEntryTypes takes a lot less
> memory than allocating 1000 DirectoryEntryTypes.
.....
> Also, when you do the
> exchange, you're moving two pointers around rather than moving two
> DirectoryEntryTypes, which is a lot faster since the pointers are
> smaller.

Is this true? Should one not expect the compiler to figure that out,
so what is shuffled
around, and memory allocated for, is for pointers, and not their
content?

Or do I have too much faith in compilers

/Björn
Björn Lundin