At this point, the latest version of the analyze_trades program—the one shown in Segment 556—extracts trade information from a trade-describing file and displays a report. Along the way, the program creates new trade objects that are accessed through an array of pointers.

In this segment, you learn about still another version of analyze_trades that reads the trade-describing file, displays a report, waits a while, and then repeats the read–display–wait cycle ad infinitum.

You soon see that the modified program creates structure objects that become not only obsolete, but also inaccessible. That brings you to the heart of this chapter, where you learn how to reclaim the memory used for such structure objects.