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In computer science, pointer analysis, or points-to analysis, is a static code analysis technique that establishes which pointers, or heap references, can point to which variables, or storage locations. It is often a component of more complex analyses such as escape analysis. A closely related technique is shape analysis.
A function pointer, also called a subroutine pointer or procedure pointer, is a pointer referencing executable code, rather than data. Dereferencing the function pointer yields the referenced function , which can be invoked and passed arguments just as in a normal function call.
An autorelative pointer is a pointer whose value is interpreted as an offset from the address of the pointer itself; thus, if a data structure has an autorelative pointer member that points to some portion of the data structure itself, then the data structure may be relocated in memory without having to update the value of the auto relative ...
this, self, and Me are keywords used in some computer programming languages to refer to the object, class, or other entity which the currently running code is a part of. The entity referred to thus depends on the execution context (such as which object has its method called).
A program can convert a pointer to any type of data (except a function pointer) to a pointer to void and back to the original type without losing information, which makes these pointers useful for polymorphic functions. The C language standard does not guarantee that the different pointer types have the same size or alignment.
Aliasing can occur in any language that can refer to one location in memory with more than one name (for example, with pointers).This is a common problem with functions that accept pointer arguments, and their tolerance (or the lack thereof) for aliasing must be carefully documented, particularly for functions that perform complex manipulations on memory areas passed to them.
A function signature consists of the function prototype. It specifies the general information about a function like the name, scope and parameters. Many programming languages use name mangling in order to pass along more semantic information from the compilers to the linkers. In addition to mangling, there is an excess of information in a ...
The concept of the virtual function solves the following problem: In object-oriented programming, when a derived class inherits from a base class, an object of the derived class may be referred to via a pointer or reference of the base class type instead of the derived class type.