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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. It is often a component of more complex analyses such as escape analysis. A closely related technique is shape analysis.
For example, not all debuggers will be able to properly follow tagged pointers; however, this is not an issue for a debugger that is designed with tagged pointers in mind. The use of zero to represent a null pointer does not suffer from these disadvantages: it is pervasive, most programming languages treat zero as a special null value, and it ...
For example, in x86 real mode, the address 0000:0000 is readable and also usually writable, and dereferencing a pointer to that address is a perfectly valid but typically unwanted action that may lead to undefined but non-crashing behavior in the application; if a null pointer is represented as a pointer to that address, dereferencing it will ...
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.
The C99 Language Specification ( ISO9899:1999 ) has the following warning in section 6.3.2.3 Pointers : "A pointer to an object or incomplete type may be converted to a pointer to a different object or incomplete type. If the resulting pointer is not correctly aligned for the pointed-to type, the behavior is undefined."
For example, accessing a variable through the use of a pointer. A stored pointer that exists to provide a reference to an object by double indirection is called an indirection node. In some older computer architectures, indirect words supported a variety of more-or-less complicated addressing modes.
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.