Author: Stan Eisenstat
Subject: Re: [Cs223] freeing contents of nodes
Date: Friday, 20 Mar 2020, 12:31:35

    > Message Posted By: Unknown
    >
    > The walkthrough says: Freeing a node will not free its contents! So if you
    > have nodes pointing to allocated strings, you want to first free the
    > allocated strings before you free the nodes (otherwise, you'll have memory
    > leaks)
    >
    > Should we be freeing the contents of the nodes in Deque.c?

No.  As stated in the specification:

  5. Each value stored in a Deque is a char *, but it need not point to the
     first character of a null-terminated string (e.g., it could be the NULL
     pointer).  Thus when adding/pushing strings returned by getline() to/on a
     Deque, the strings themselves are NOT duplicated.  It follows that if they
     are not freed outside of the Deque ADT after a pointer is removed or
     popped and returned, that storage could be lost.

--Stan-