CS50x 2026 - Lecture 4 - Memory

This CS50 lecture explores memory management in C, focusing on pointers, addresses, and file I/O. It introduces hexadecimal notation for representing memory addresses and explains how pointers store these addresses, enabling direct memory manipulation. The lecture demystifies strings as character pointers and covers dynamic memory allocation with `malloc` and `free` to prevent memory leaks. It also covers how to use Valgrind to detect memory-related errors. The lecture transitions into file I/O, demonstrating how to read and write files, including creating a program to copy files byte by byte. It emphasizes the importance of checking for null pointers and managing memory carefully to avoid buffer overflows and stack overflows.