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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 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.
In computer programming, a weak reference is a reference that does not protect the referenced object from collection by a garbage collector, unlike a strong reference.An object referenced only by weak references – meaning "every chain of references that reaches the object includes at least one weak reference as a link" – is considered weakly reachable, and can be treated as unreachable and ...
The feature that separates pointers from other kinds of reference is that a pointer's value is meant to be interpreted as a memory address, which is a rather low-level concept. References serve as a level of indirection: A pointer's value determines which memory address (that is, which datum) is to be used in a calculation.
A reference is an abstract data type and may be implemented in many ways. Typically, a reference refers to data stored in memory on a given system, and its internal value is the memory address of the data, i.e. a reference is implemented as a pointer. For this reason a reference is often said to "point to" the data.
More generally, dangling references and wild references are references that do not resolve to a valid destination. Dangling pointers arise during object destruction , when an object that has an incoming reference is deleted or deallocated, without modifying the value of the pointer, so that the pointer still points to the memory location of the ...
In computing, a null pointer or null reference is a value saved for indicating that the pointer or reference does not refer to a valid object. Programs routinely use null pointers to represent conditions such as the end of a list of unknown length or the failure to perform some action; this use of null pointers can be compared to nullable types ...
The term fat pointer simply refers to a pointer with additional associated information. The additional information may be a vtable pointer for dynamic dispatch described above, but is more commonly the associated object's size to describe e.g. a slice. [citation needed