Returning min value as pointer from function
<p>Okay, so here's the deal. I have been working on this problem for a few days now and have tried every resource available to me. Just this morning I sent my last resort email to my Professor, but I want to keep trying to work on it while I wait for his answer. I am supposed to be returning a pointer to the smallest value in an array of random numbers between 0 - 1410 after assigning them through pointer arithmetic(got this part to work just fine). There was a skeleton file included for the assignment, but I like to build things from the ground up(using his parameters of course). Here is my code:</p>

<pre><code>#include &lt;iostream&gt;
#include &lt;cstdlib&gt;
using namespace std;

int* find_smallest_number(int*, int);

int main()

{
    const int size = 10;
    int random_array[size] = {};

    int* smallestNumber = find_smallest_number(random_array, size);

    srand(time(NULL));

    for(int i = 0; i &lt; size; i++)
    {
        *(random_array + i) = rand()%1410;
        cout &lt;&lt; random_array[i] &lt;&lt; endl;
        cout &lt;&lt; &amp;*(random_array + i) &lt;&lt; endl;
    }

    cout &lt;&lt; "The smallest number is " &lt;&lt; *smallestNumber &lt;&lt; endl;

    return 0;
}


int* find_smallest_number(int *random_array, int size)

{

/*    
    for(int i = 0; i &lt; size; i++)

    {
       if(*(random_array + i) &gt; *(random_array + 1))
       {
           return *(random_array + i);
       }
       else if(*(random_array + i) &lt; *(random_array + 1))
       {
           return *(random_array+1);
       }

    } */

    return &amp;min_element;
}
</code></pre>

<p>I honestly can not tell you how many different ways I've tried. This is just the most recent attempt(all have ended in massive amts of [headdesk]). Any tips or hints you guys can come up with for me to try?? I have tried creating another variable to hold the value/address, I have tried as many different ways of comparison as I currently know(this min_element thing was something I found on the internet). I can occasionally get my code to compile, but when I do it will only return the value/address of the FIRST element in the array(no matter what my code looks like). And if I try to return a pointer it gets angry and tells me "invalid conversion from int to int*" Please help me? (Also, sorry if the format of my code is off a little bit, I tried to follow the instructions for it but may have failed in that too :/)</p>
