[olibenu]

Sweet is the memory of past troubles. I've forgotten who said that.
It started with a little laziness.
I had a function which returned a pointer to a list and got tired of checking for NULL.
So instead of

if (somelist == NULL)
{
cout << "somelist has 0 items";
}
else cout << "somelist has " << somelist->size() << " items";

I decided to use

cout << "somelist has " << somelist->size() << " items";

Making the HUGE mistake of changing the function from

list<int>* obj = NULL
obj = new list<int>;
/*sum stuff*/
return obj;

to

list<int> obj
/*sum stuff*/
return &obj;

I tested it with valgrind and it worked though warning about returning a local variable's address
Running outside valgrind gave segmentation errors!
And my code was calling functions from 2 or so shared libraries, I just
couldn't think of where the errors came from (the nightmare!).

Lesson learnt (or relearnt ;-)): never, ever, return a function's variable address.
lesson not learnt: why would valgrind not trip over it?