I am aware you cannot use an initialiser list for an array. However I have heard of ways that you can set an array of pointers to NULL in a way that is similar to an initialiser list. I am not certain how this is done. I have heard that a pointer is set to NULL by default, though I do not know if this is guaranteed/ in the C++ standard. I am also not sure if initialising through the new operator compared to normal allocation can make a difference too.