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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 ...
On Windows platforms, Structured Exception Handling (SEH) may be employed to wrap native code in SEH try/catch blocks so as to capture machine (CPU/FPU) generated software interrupts (such as NULL pointer access violations and divide-by-zero operations), and to handle these situations before the interrupt is propagated back up into the JVM (i.e ...
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.
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".
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.
The implementation of exception handling in programming languages typically involves a fair amount of support from both a code generator and the runtime system accompanying a compiler. (It was the addition of exception handling to C++ that ended the useful lifetime of the original C++ compiler, Cfront. [18]) Two schemes are most common.
Void safety (also known as null safety) is a guarantee within an object-oriented programming language that no object references will have null or void values. In object-oriented languages, access to objects is achieved through references (or, equivalently, pointers ).
Determining the root cause – debugging the bug – can be simple in some cases, where the program will consistently cause a segmentation fault (e.g., dereferencing a null pointer), while in other cases the bug can be difficult to reproduce and depend on memory allocation on each run (e.g., dereferencing a dangling pointer).