Describe a situation where memberwise assignment is not desirable.

Memberwise assignment is the process in which the individual elements of one data structure, such as an array or a class, are assigned to the corresponding elements in another data structure of the same type. This can be useful when you want to create a copy of an object or set two objects equal to each other. However, there are situations where memberwise assignment is not desirable.

Memberwise assignment could create problems if the data structures involved have references to objects (e.g., pointers). In this case, memberwise assignment results in a shallow copy rather than a deep copy. Shallow copy means that the references are copied, but the objects they point to are not. As a result, two data structures might end up sharing the same objects, which can cause unintended side effects.

Consider a situation where you have a class 'Person' with a member variable 'name' which is a pointer to a dynamically-allocated character array (C-string). Suppose you create two instances of the class 'Person' - A and B, and then perform a memberwise assignment: A = B; In this case, after memberwise assignment, both objects A and B will have their 'name' pointers pointing to the same memory location. If any changes are made to the 'name' of A, it will also modify the 'name' of B and vice versa. This is undesirable because each object should have its own independent 'name' that can be modified without affecting the other object. To avoid such scenarios, you should use a deep copy method instead of memberwise assignment, which will ensure that separate memory is allocated for the 'name' variable in each object, and their values are copied individually.