Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours, Third Edition

The Stack and the Heap

Programmers generally deal with five areas of memory:

Global name space

The heap

Registers

Code space

The stack

Local variables are on the stack, along with function parameters. Code is in code space, of course, and global variables are in global name space. The registers are used for internal housekeeping functions, such as keeping track of the top of the stack and the instruction pointer. Just about all remaining memory is given over to the heap, which is sometimes referred to as the free store.

The problem with local variables is that they don't persist. When the function returns, the local variables are thrown away. Global variables solve that problem at the cost of unrestricted access throughout the program, which leads ...