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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 ...
Each pointer has a type it points to, but one can freely cast between pointer types (but not between a function pointer and an object pointer). A special pointer type called the “void pointer” allows pointing to any (non-function) object, but is limited by the fact that it cannot be dereferenced directly (it shall be cast).
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.
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 ...
Boxing's most prominent use is in Java where there is a distinction between reference and value types for reasons such as runtime efficiency and syntax and semantic issues. In Java, a LinkedList can only store values of type Object. One might desire to have a LinkedList of int, but this is not directly possible.
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.
Further, because C and C++ expose pointers and references directly, there is a distinction between whether the pointer itself is constant, and whether the data pointed to by the pointer is constant. Applying const to a pointer itself, as in SomeClass * const ptr , means that the contents being referenced can be modified, but the reference ...
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 ...