Your program most assuredly does NOT run and does NOT work. It runs to completion if you insert a number in such a way so that it doesn't crash and it works under no circumstances as far as I can tell. Reread WaltP's and Denniz's comments. The program does not even do what you state that it does (putting the element in the FRONT of the array). Call your printIt function after you insert/delete and see what I mean, rather than using your cout statements inside of the functions. Also, try inserting a large number (i.e. 100) and see what happens. The cout statements in your insertion function are hindering, not helping, you to debug the program in my view, as they do not reflect what your array contents are after you insert.