These objects are the arguments of partial functions whose disjoint parts are considered by the separating conjunction operator in separation logic. One of these objects can be the first argument of mmap (“M-map”) or the only argument of brk (“B-R-K”). Tony Hoare called his invention of one of these objects a billion-dollar mistake. Code optimization techniques often fail in the presence of these objects due to aliasing, which occurs when two of them contain the same data. The most general class of these objects is the return type of malloc (“MAL-uck”), and their careless use can lead to a namesake “null” exception. In C, these objects can be generated by applying the ampersand operator to a variable name and can be dereferenced with an asterisk. For 10 points, name this generic data type that holds memory addresses of data. ■END■
ANSWER: pointers [accept references in place of “pointers”; accept null pointers; accept pointer aliasing; accept void pointers; accept null pointer exception; accept memory addresses until read]
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