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Compass/quest arrow - sometimes found in RPGs, first-person shooters and driving games, they help guide the player toward the objective. An example is in the first-person shooter BioShock, which displays an arrow pointing the direction of the next objective on the top of the player's HUD. Sometimes the compass itself might not be a real compass ...
Unlike a typical compass, a luopan does not point to the north magnetic pole of Earth. The needle of a luopan points to the south magnetic pole (it does not point to the geographic South Pole). The Chinese word for compass, 指南針 (zhǐnánzhēn in Mandarin), translates to “south-pointing needle.”
Dangling pointers and wild pointers in computer programming are pointers that do not point to a valid object of the appropriate type. These are special cases of memory safety violations. More generally, dangling references and wild references are references that do not resolve to a valid destination.
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A compass should be laid down on a level surface so that the needle only rests or hangs on the bearing fused to the compass casing – if used at a tilt, the needle might touch the casing on the compass and not move freely, hence not pointing to the magnetic north accurately, giving a faulty reading.
Direction determination refers to the ways in which a cardinal direction or compass point can be determined in navigation and wayfinding.The most direct method is using a compass (magnetic compass or gyrocompass), but indirect methods exist, based on the Sun path (unaided or by using a watch or sundial), the stars, and satellite navigation.
In navigation the instrument is also called a cross-staff and was used to determine angles, for instance the angle between the horizon and Polaris or the sun to determine a vessel's latitude, or the angle between the top and bottom of an object to determine the distance to said object if its height is known, or the height of the object if its distance is known, or the horizontal angle between ...
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 ...