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In some programming language environments (at least one proprietary Lisp implementation, for example), [citation needed] the value used as the null pointer (called nil in Lisp) may actually be a pointer to a block of internal data useful to the implementation (but not explicitly reachable from user programs), thus allowing the same register to be used as a useful constant and a quick way of ...
In C code, segmentation faults most often occur because of errors in pointer use, particularly in C dynamic memory allocation. Dereferencing a null pointer, which results in undefined behavior, will usually cause a segmentation fault. This is because a null pointer cannot be a valid memory address.
The language does not provide any explicit pointer manipulation operators. It is still possible for code to attempt to dereference a null reference (null pointer), however, which results in a run-time exception being thrown. The space occupied by unreferenced memory objects is recovered automatically by garbage collection at run-time. [20]
Null pointer dereference – A null pointer dereference will often cause an exception or program termination in most environments, but can cause corruption in operating system kernels or systems without memory protection or when use of the null pointer involves a large or negative offset.
To expose dangling pointer errors, one common programming technique is to set pointers to the null pointer or to an invalid address once the storage they point to has been released. When the null pointer is dereferenced (in most languages) the program will immediately terminate—there is no potential for data corruption or unpredictable behavior.
For specific classes of errors, targeted automatic bug-fixing techniques use specialized templates: null pointer exception repair [25] [26] [15] with insertion of a conditional statement to check whether the value of a variable is null. integer overflow repair [10] buffer overflow repair [10]
A null pointer is usually represented as a pointer to address 0 in the address space; many operating systems set up the MMU to indicate that the page that contains that address is not in memory, and do not include that page in the virtual address space, so that attempts to read or write the memory referenced by a null pointer get an invalid ...
C does not provide direct support to exception handling: it is the programmer's responsibility to prevent errors in the first place and test return values from the functions.