Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Using pointers significantly improves performance for repetitive operations, like traversing iterable data structures (e.g. strings, lookup tables, control tables, linked lists, and tree structures). In particular, it is often much cheaper in time and space to copy and dereference pointers than it is to copy and access the data to which the ...
Many OOP programming languages (including Java, D, ECMAScript, and C#) make use of object references. Object references, which are similar to pointers in other languages, allow for objects to be passed around by address so that the whole object need not be copied. A Java example, when "copying" an object using simple assignment:
C# also allows the programmer to disable the normal type-checking and other safety features of the CLR, which then enables the use of pointer variables. When using this feature, the programmer must mark the code using the unsafe keyword. JNI, P/Invoke, and "unsafe" code are equally risky features, exposing possible security holes and ...
When using update coalescing with an appropriate treatment of new objects, more than 99% of the counter updates are eliminated for typical Java benchmarks. Interestingly, update coalescing also eliminates the need to employ atomic operations during pointer updates in a concurrent setting, this solving reference counting issues in a concurrent ...
The java.util.LinkedList class stores the elements in nodes that each have a pointer to the previous and next nodes in the List. The List can be traversed by following the pointers, and elements can be added or removed simply by changing the pointers around to place the node in its proper place. [15]
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.
On many common platforms, this use of pointer punning can create problems if different pointers are aligned in machine-specific ways. Furthermore, pointers of different sizes can alias accesses to the same memory, causing problems that are unchecked by the compiler. Even when data size and pointer representation match, however, compilers can ...
If the types are not compatible, an exception will be thrown (when dealing with references) or a null pointer will be returned (when dealing with pointers). A Java typecast behaves similarly; if the object being cast is not actually an instance of the target type, and cannot be converted to one by a language-defined method, an instance of java ...