How do the operators < and > work with pointers?
- by Øystein
Just for fun, I had a std::list of const char*, each element pointing to a null-terminated text string, and ran a std::list::sort() on it. As it happens, it sort of (no pun intended) did not sort the strings. Considering that it was working on pointers, that makes sense.
According to the documentation of std::list::sort(), it (by default) uses the operator < between the elements to compare.
Forgetting about the list for a moment, my actual question is: How do these (, <, =, <=) operators work on pointers in C++ and C? Do they simply compare the actual memory addresses?
char* p1 = (char*) 0xDAB0BC47;
char* p2 = (char*) 0xBABEC475;
e.g. on a 32-bit, little-endian system, p1 p2 because 0xDAB0BC47 0xBABEC475?
Testing seems to confirm this, but I thought it'd be good to put it on StackOverflow for future reference. C and C++ both do some weird things to pointers, so you never really know...
