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In object-oriented computer programming, a null object is an object with no referenced value or with defined neutral (null) behavior.The null object design pattern, which describes the uses of such objects and their behavior (or lack thereof), was first published as "Void Value" [1] and later in the Pattern Languages of Program Design book series as "Null Object".
In computing, a null pointer or null reference is a value saved for indicating that the pointer or reference does not refer to a valid object. Programs routinely use null pointers to represent conditions such as the end of a list of unknown length or the failure to perform some action; this use of null pointers can be compared to nullable types ...
Reference types include class types, interface types, and array types. When the constructor is called, an object is created on the heap and a reference is assigned to the variable. When a variable of an object gets out of scope, the reference is broken and when there are no references left, the object gets marked as garbage.
In a 2009 talk, Tony Hoare traced the invention of the null pointer to his design of the ALGOL W language and called it a "mistake": I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W).
However, a finalizer may create new references to an object, requiring object resurrection to prevent a dangling reference. Wild pointers, also called uninitialized pointers, arise when a pointer is used prior to initialization to some known state, which is possible in some programming languages.
load onto the stack a reference from an array aastore 53 0101 0011 arrayref, index, value → store a reference in an array aconst_null 01 0000 0001 → null push a null reference onto the stack aload 19 0001 1001 1: index → objectref load a reference onto the stack from a local variable #index: aload_0 2a 0010 1010 → objectref
Reference types differ from these in that the entities they refer to are always accessed via references; for example, whereas in C++ it's possible to have either a std:: string and a std:: string *, where the former is a mutable string and the latter is an explicit pointer to a mutable string (unless it's a null pointer), in Java it is only ...
For object values, the reference cannot change. This allows the Java compiler to "capture" the value of the variable at run-time and store a copy as a field in the inner class. Once the outer method has terminated and its stack frame has been removed, the original variable is gone but the inner class's private copy persists in the class's own ...