Until now, in all our programs, we have only had as much memory available as we declared for our variables, having the size of all of them to be determined in the source code, before the execution of the program. But, what if we need a variable amount of memory that can only be determined during runtime? For example, in the case that we need some user input to determine the necessary amount of memory space.
The answer is dynamic memory, for which C++ integrates the operators new and delete.
Operators new and new[]
In order to request dynamic memory we use the operator new. new is followed by a data type specifier and -if a sequence of more than one element is required- the number of these within brackets []. It returns a pointer to the beginning of the new block of memory allocated. Its form is:
pointer = new type
pointer = new type [number_of_elements]
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