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To expose dangling pointer errors, one common programming technique is to set pointers to the null pointer or to an invalid address once the storage they point to has been released. When the null pointer is dereferenced (in most languages) the program will immediately terminate—there is no potential for data corruption or unpredictable behavior.
An autorelative pointer is a pointer whose value is interpreted as an offset from the address of the pointer itself; thus, if a data structure has an autorelative pointer member that points to some portion of the data structure itself, then the data structure may be relocated in memory without having to update the value of the auto relative ...
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 ...
A stale pointer bug, otherwise known as an aliasing bug, is a class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic memory allocation, especially via the malloc function or equivalent.
Smart pointers can facilitate intentional programming by expressing, in the type, how the memory of the referent of the pointer will be managed. For example, if a C++ function returns a pointer, there is no way to know whether the caller should delete the memory of the referent when the caller is finished with the information.
For example, the standard library that forms part of the specification of the C programming language provides functions for file input and output that return or take values of type "pointer to FILE" that represent file streams (see C file input/output), but the concrete implementation of the type FILE is not specified.
The d-pointer pattern is one of the implementations of the opaque pointer. It is commonly used in C++ classes due to its advantages (noted below). A d-pointer is a private data member of the class that points to an instance of a structure. This method allows class declarations to omit private data members, except for the d-pointer itself. [6]
The same file may be opened simultaneously by several processes, and even by the same process, resulting in several file descriptors for the same file; depending on the file organization and filesystem. Operations on the descriptors such as moving the file pointer or closing it are independent—they do not affect other descriptors for the same ...