advanced patterns with dynamic array allocation and pointer arithmetic in C
I'm working on a personal project and I'm prototyping a solution and I've been working on this all day and I'm working with unexpected behavior when I allocate a dynamic array of integers and attempt to manipulate its elements using pointer arithmetic... My code successfully allocates memory, but when I try to access or modify certain elements, I'm seeing inconsistent values and unexpected behavior. Here is a simplified version of my code: ```c #include <stdio.h> #include <stdlib.h> int main() { int *arr; int n = 10; arr = (int *)malloc(n * sizeof(int)); if (arr == NULL) { perror("Failed to allocate memory"); return 1; } for (int i = 0; i < n; i++) { arr[i] = i * 2; } // Trying to access the elements using pointer arithmetic for (int j = 0; j < n; j++) { printf("Element %d: %d\n", j, *(arr + j)); } // Modifying an element using pointer arithmetic *(arr + 5) = 100; // Accessing modified element printf("Modified Element 5: %d\n", *(arr + 5)); free(arr); return 0; } ``` I expect the output for the modified element to be `100`, but sometimes I get garbage values or even a segmentation fault. I've double-checked that the `malloc` statement is not returning `NULL`, and I am freeing the allocated memory correctly. I've also validated that I'm accessing indices within the bounds of the allocated array. I'm compiling this code using `gcc` version 11.2.0 on a Linux system. Is there something I might be missing, or is there a common pitfall with pointer arithmetic that could cause this scenario? Any insights or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Any ideas what could be causing this? Thanks, I really appreciate it! Any feedback is welcome! For context: I'm using C on Windows 11.