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A dangling pointer is a pointer that does not point to a valid object and consequently may make a program crash or behave oddly. In the Pascal or C programming languages, pointers that are not specifically initialized may point to unpredictable addresses in memory. The following example code shows a dangling pointer:
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.
Many languages have explicit pointers or references. 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 ...
In computer programming, an indirection (also called a reference) is a way of referring to something using a name, reference, or container instead of the value itself. The most common form of indirection is the act of manipulating a value through its memory address. For example, accessing a variable through the use of a pointer.
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.
While a pointer contains the address of the item to which it refers, a handle is an abstraction of a reference which is managed externally; its opacity allows the referent to be relocated in memory by the system without invalidating the handle, making it similar to virtual memory for pointers, but even more abstracted.
Any pointer (four bytes) will be 4-byte aligned. (e.g.: char*, int*) The only notable differences in alignment for an LP64 64-bit system when compared to a 32-bit system are: A long (eight bytes) will be 8-byte aligned. A double (eight bytes) will be 8-byte aligned. A long long (eight bytes) will be 8-byte aligned.
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.