Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Pointer analysis algorithms are used to convert collected raw pointer usages (assignments of one pointer to another or assigning a pointer to point to another one) to a useful graph of what each pointer can point to. [4] Steensgaard's algorithm and Andersen's algorithm are common context-insensitive, flow-insensitive algorithms for pointer ...
C appears to support assignment of array pointers, but in fact these are simply pointers to the array's first element, and again do not carry the array's size. [ citation needed ] In most languages, data types are not first-class objects, though in some object-oriented languages, classes are first-class objects and are instances of metaclasses .
While arrays in C are fixed, pointers to them are interchangeable. This flexibility allows C to manipulate any length array using the same code. It also leaves the programmer with the responsibility not to write outside the allocated array, as no checks are built in into the language. In Pascal, arrays are a distinct type from pointers.
In languages with typed pointers like C, the increment operator steps the pointer to the next item of that type -- increasing the value of the pointer by the size of that type. When a pointer (of the right type) points to any item in an array, incrementing (or decrementing) makes the pointer point to the "next" (or "previous") item of that array.
Iterators generalize pointers to elements of an array (which indeed can be used as iterators), and their syntax is designed to resemble that of C pointer arithmetic, where the * and -> operators are used to reference the element to which the iterator points and pointer arithmetic operators like ++ are used to modify iterators in the traversal ...
A basic example is in the argv argument to the main function in C (and C++), which is given in the prototype as char **argv—this is because the variable argv itself is a pointer to an array of strings (an array of arrays), so *argv is a pointer to the 0th string (by convention the name of the program), and **argv is the 0th character of the ...
For example, in the Pascal programming language, the declaration type MyTable = array [1.. 4, 1.. 2] of integer, defines a new array data type called MyTable. The declaration var A: MyTable then defines a variable A of that type, which is an aggregate of eight elements, each being an integer variable identified by two indices.
Linked data structures are thus contrasted with arrays and other data structures that require performing arithmetic operations on pointers. This distinction holds even when the nodes are actually implemented as elements of a single array, and the references are actually array indices : as long as no arithmetic is done on those indices, the data ...