Wild pointers are uninitialized pointers that point to any random position in memory while being unassigned from any other memory location. This could occasionally result in a programme crashing or acting erratically.
For instance:
int *ptr;A pointer called ptr is generated in this example, but it is empty. The pointer ptr is now a wild pointer as a result. Declaring a pointer without initialising it has drawbacks of its own. One such drawback is that it will save any worthless information in it. It will hold in it arbitrarily a position in memory. This random allocation frequently becomes difficult for a programmer to debug, leading to several issues with the program’s operation.
A. Avoiding problems due to WILD pointers
In order to avoid problems that can arise while dereferencing a wild reference, we frequently opt to change a void pointer to a NULL pointer. By doing this, our pointer will instead point to a NULL position rather than any trash memory location. Simply setting a wild pointer equal to NULL will make it a NULL pointer.
B. Dereferencing
A wild pointer cannot be dereferenced since we are unsure of the data it is pointing at in memory. Dereferencing a wild pointer can result in numerous problems as well as a software crash.
Example:
#include <bits/stdc++.h>
using namespace std;
int main() {
int *arr;
for(int i=0; i<5 ; i++)
cout << arr[i] << ” “;
return 0;
}Output:1 0 -426634956 32764 0
