What you're doing here is simply reading and writing to memory that used to be the address of a. Now that you're outside of foo, it's just a pointer to some random memory area. It just so happens that in your example, that memory area does exist and nothing else is using it at the moment. You don't break anything by continuing to use it, and nothing else has overwritten it yet. Therefore, the 5 is still there. In a real program, that memory would be re-used almost immediately and you'd break something by doing this (though the symptoms may not appear until much later!)

当您从foo返回时，您告诉操作系统您不再使用该内存，并且可以将其重新分配给其他内存。如果你很幸运，它从来没有被重新分配，而且操作系统也没有发现你再次使用它，那么你就可以摆脱这个谎言。很有可能你最终会以那个地址结尾。

现在，如果你想知道为什么编译器没有报错，这可能是因为foo被优化淘汰了。它通常会警告你这类事情。C假设您知道自己在做什么，而且从技术上讲，这里没有违反scope(在foo之外没有引用a本身)，只有内存访问规则，这只会触发警告而不是错误。

简而言之:这通常不会起作用，但有时会偶然起作用。

可以，因为a是在其作用域的生命周期内临时分配的变量(foo函数)。从foo返回后，内存是空闲的，可以被覆盖。

你所做的被描述为未定义的行为。结果无法预测。

你只是返回一个内存地址，这是允许的，但可能是一个错误。

是的，如果你试图解引用该内存地址，你将有未定义的行为。

int * ref () {

 int tmp = 100;
 return &tmp;
}

int main () {

 int * a = ref();
 //Up until this point there is defined results
 //You can even print the address returned
 // but yes probably a bug

 cout << *a << endl;//Undefined results
}

It's 'Dirty' way of using memory addresses. When you return an address (pointer) you don't know whether it belongs to local scope of a function. It's just an address. Now that you invoked the 'foo' function, that address (memory location) of 'a' was already allocated there in the (safely, for now at least) addressable memory of your application (process). After the 'foo' function returned, the address of 'a' can be considered 'dirty' but it's there, not cleaned up, nor disturbed/modified by expressions in other part of program (in this specific case at least). A C/C++ compiler doesn't stop you from such 'dirty' access (might warn you though, if you care). You can safely use (update) any memory location that is in the data segment of your program instance (process) unless you protect the address by some means.

从函数返回后，所有标识符都将被销毁，而不是将值保存在内存位置，如果没有标识符，则无法定位值。但该位置仍然包含前一个函数存储的值。

因此，这里函数foo()返回a的地址，a在返回地址后被销毁。您可以通过返回的地址访问修改后的值。

让我举一个真实的例子:

假设一个人把钱藏在一个地方，并告诉你这个地方。过了一段时间，告诉你钱的位置的人死了。但你仍然可以拿到那些隐藏的钱。

在c++中，你可以访问任何地址，但这并不意味着你应该这样做。您正在访问的地址不再有效。它之所以能工作，是因为在foo返回后没有其他东西扰乱内存，但在许多情况下它可能崩溃。试着用Valgrind分析你的程序，甚至只是优化编译它，然后看看…