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In computer programming, specifically when using the imperative programming paradigm, an assertion is a predicate (a Boolean-valued function over the state space, usually expressed as a logical proposition using the variables of a program) connected to a point in the program, that always should evaluate to true at that point in code execution.
In computer programming, lazy initialization is the tactic of delaying the creation of an object, the calculation of a value, or some other expensive process until the first time it is needed.
Another frequent source of dangling pointers is a jumbled combination of malloc() and free() library calls: a pointer becomes dangling when the block of memory it points to is freed. As with the previous example one way to avoid this is to make sure to reset the pointer to null after freeing its reference—as demonstrated below.
The language does not provide any explicit pointer manipulation operators. It is still possible for code to attempt to dereference a null reference (null pointer), however, which results in a run-time exception being thrown. The space occupied by unreferenced memory objects is recovered automatically by garbage collection at run-time. [20]
Some features of C++ that promote more type-safe code: The new operator returns a pointer of type based on operand, whereas malloc returns a void pointer. C++ code can use virtual functions and templates to achieve polymorphism without void pointers. Safer casting operators, such as dynamic cast that performs run-time type checking.
The canonical heap overflow technique overwrites dynamic memory allocation linkage (such as malloc metadata) and uses the resulting pointer exchange to overwrite a program function pointer. For example, on older versions of Linux , two buffers allocated next to each other on the heap could result in the first buffer overwriting the second ...
Nullable types are a feature of some programming languages which allow a value to be set to the special value NULL instead of the usual possible values of the data type.In statically typed languages, a nullable type is an option type, [citation needed] while in dynamically typed languages (where values have types, but variables do not), equivalent behavior is provided by having a single null ...
In C code, segmentation faults most often occur because of errors in pointer use, particularly in C dynamic memory allocation. Dereferencing a null pointer, which results in undefined behavior, will usually cause a segmentation fault. This is because a null pointer cannot be a valid memory address.