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Dangling pointers: The bane of every C/C++ programmer's existence?

ishankbg.dev

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Re: Dangling pointers: The bane of every C/C++ programmer's existence?

#2
This is a narrow view. What about the ".next" element of a linked list node that's moved to the tail of the list? If you're not using null to indicate end of list, .next is semantically wrong but harmless.

Perhaps a better example is Knuth's Dancing Links. A node is taken out of a larger data structure, pointers left unchanged, because the node will be reinserted later.

"Dangling pointer" is intuitive, but ultimately too broad to have much meaning.