What is the address of back() in an empty container?

I mistakenly took the address of the reference returned by the back() operator in an empty container and was surprised to see that the address wasn't zero.

If a container e.g. std::deque is 开发者_运维技巧empty, what does back() return?

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it returns the last element.

on this page: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/BackInsertionSequence.html

precondition: !a.empty()

Equivalent to *(--a.end()).

since the precondition is the deque is not empty, then it means it's undefined behavior.

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Calling front or back on an empty standard container results in undefined behavior.