Checking array of object for "magic number"?

[Sixx]

I have a class Figure and from that class I have derived basic figures in chess (pawn, king, etc). I need to simulate a chess board so I created an array as:

Figure* chess[8][8];

I did that so that the chess board will be at first uninitialized (it points to address 0xccccccc). In my program I initialize some spaces with pawns etc. But if i try to writte a loop to print out all the positions of pieces it reports an error because it tries to read from invalid location (0xcccc). I tried with if statement:

if(chess[i][j]!=NULL) { print();}; //exemple function

so that if it comes to unitialized space to ignore it but it doesn't work.

My guess is that i didn't check the adress of chess pointer correctly, but I don't know any other way.

Thank you for your time :)

[hamsterman]

if invalid pointer is equal to 0xcccccccc, then to check if a pointer is invalid, compare it to 0xcccccccc, not 0.
Though you should use 0 for invalid pointers. That's standard. Also, 0xcccccccc may actually point to something you need.

[guestgulkan]

0xCCCCCCCC is Microsoft compiler code for unitialised pointer (you may also see some variation of this 0xCDCDCDCD and so forth).

I can't see why he cannot set the initial pointer array to NULL :

Figure* chess[8][8] = {0}; //initialise all the pointers to 0

[Sixx]

Thank you both. It look's much safer if I just initialize all with 0, than to check all for 0xcccccc. I always complicate things :\

EDIT: I can't initialize chess in the class (it's a member of class Board). How can I initialize it in the constructor of the class Board?

class Board {
Figure* chess[8][8]  //doesn't alow initalization
public:
Board () { chess={0}; }; //error 

Is there a faster way than writting two loops to initalize all to 0?

[guestgulkan]

Oops - Didn't realize the array was a member of a class.

In the constructor just initialise the array the long way around - using a nested loop - For example;

Board () 
{ 
    for (int row =  0; row < 8;  ++row)
     for (int col =0; col < 8; ++col)
        chess[row][col] = 0;

}

[hamsterman]

there is memset