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Indirection
In computer programming, indirection (also called dereferencing) is the ability to reference something using a name, reference, or container instead of the value itself. The most common form of indirection is the act of manipulating a value through its memory address. For example, accessing a variable through the use of a pointer. A stored pointer that exists to provide a reference to an object by double indirection is called an ''indirection node''. In some older computer architectures, indirect words supported a variety of more-or-less complicated addressing modes. Another important example is the domain name system which enables names such as en.wikipedia.org to be used in place of network addresses such as 208.80.154.224. The indirection from human-readable names to network addresses means that the references to a web page become more memorable, and links do not need to change when a web site is relocated to a different server. Overview A famous aphorism of Butler Lampson goe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fundamental Theorem Of Software Engineering
The fundamental theorem of software engineering (FTSE) is a term originated by Andrew Koenig to describe a remark by Butler Lampson attributed to David J. Wheeler: The theorem does not describe an actual theorem that can be proven; rather, it is a general principle for managing complexity through abstraction. The theorem is often expanded by the humorous clause "…except for the problem of too many levels of indirection," referring to the fact that too many abstractions may create intrinsic complexity issues of their own. For example, the use of protocol layering in computer networks, which today is ubiquitous, has been criticized in ways that are typical of more general disadvantages of abstraction. Here, the adding of extra levels of indirection may cause higher layers to duplicate the functionality of lower layers, leading to inefficiency, and functionality at one layer may need data present only at another layer, which fundamentally violates the goal of separation into dif ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Programming
Computer programming is the process of performing a particular computation (or more generally, accomplishing a specific computing result), usually by designing and building an executable computer program. Programming involves tasks such as analysis, generating algorithms, profiling algorithms' accuracy and resource consumption, and the implementation of algorithms (usually in a chosen programming language, commonly referred to as coding). The source code of a program is written in one or more languages that are intelligible to programmers, rather than machine code, which is directly executed by the central processing unit. The purpose of programming is to find a sequence of instructions that will automate the performance of a task (which can be as complex as an operating system) on a computer, often for solving a given problem. Proficient programming thus usually requires expertise in several different subjects, including knowledge of the application domain, specialized algori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proxy Server
In computer networking, a proxy server is a server application that acts as an intermediary between a client requesting a resource and the server providing that resource. Instead of connecting directly to a server that can fulfill a request for a resource, such as a file or web page, the client directs the request to the proxy server, which evaluates the request and performs the required network transactions. This serves as a method to simplify or control the complexity of the request, or provide additional benefits such as load balancing, privacy, or security. Proxies were devised to add structure and encapsulation to distributed systems. A proxy server thus functions on behalf of the client when requesting service, potentially masking the true origin of the request to the resource server. Types A proxy server may reside on the user's local computer, or at any point between the user's computer and destination servers on the Internet. A proxy server that passes unmodified r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Types
In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a set of possible values and a set of allowed operations on it. A data type tells the compiler or interpreter how the programmer intends to use the data. Most programming languages support basic data types of integer numbers (of varying sizes), floating-point numbers (which approximate real numbers), characters and Booleans. A data type constrains the possible values that an expression, such as a variable or a function, might take. This data type defines the operations that can be done on the data, the meaning of the data, and the way values of that type can be stored. Concept A data type is a collection or grouping of data values. Such a grouping may be defined for many reasons: similarity, convenience, or to focus the attention. It is frequently a matter of good organization that aids the understanding of complex definitions. Almost all programming languages explicitly include the notion of data ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Law Of Demeter
The Law of Demeter (LoD) or principle of least knowledge is a design guideline for developing software, particularly object-oriented programs. In its general form, the LoD is a specific case of loose coupling. The guideline was proposed by Ian Holland at Northeastern University towards the end of 1987, and the following three recommendations serve as a succinct summary: * Each unit should have only limited knowledge about other units: only units "closely" related to the current unit. * Each unit should only talk to its friends; don't talk to strangers. * Only talk to your immediate friends. The fundamental notion is that a given object should assume as little as possible about the structure or properties of anything else (including its subcomponents), in accordance with the principle of "information hiding". It may be viewed as a corollary to the principle of least privilege, which dictates that a module possess only the information and resources necessary for its legitimate purp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dereference Operator
In computer programming, the dereference operator or indirection operator, sometimes denoted by "*" (i.e. an asterisk), is a unary operator (i.e. one with a single operand) found in C-like languages that include pointer variables. It operates on a pointer variable, and returns an l-value equivalent to the value at the pointer address. This is called "dereferencing" the pointer. For example, the C code int x; int *p; // * is used in the declaration: // p is a pointer to an integer, since (after dereferencing), // *p is an integer x = 0; // now x 0 p = &x; // & takes the address of x // now *p 0, since p &x and therefore *p x *p = 1; // equivalent to x = 1, since p &x // now *p 1 and x 1 assigned 1 to variable x by using the dereference operator and a pointer to the variable x. Composition The unary * operator, as defined in C and C++, can be used in compositions in cases of multiple indirection, where multiple acts of dereferenci ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reference (computer Science)
In computer programming, a reference is a value that enables a program to indirectly access a particular data, such as a variable's value or a record, in the computer's memory or in some other storage device. The reference is said to refer to the datum, and accessing the datum is called dereferencing the reference. A reference is distinct from the datum itself. 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. Other implementations include an offset (difference) between the datum's address and some fixed "base" address, an index, unique key, or identifier used in a lookup operation into an array or table, an operating system handle, a physical address on a storage device, or a network address such as a URL. For ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pointer (computer Programming)
In computer science, a pointer is an object in many programming languages that stores a memory address. This can be that of another value located in computer memory, or in some cases, that of memory-mapped computer hardware. A pointer ''references'' a location in memory, and obtaining the value stored at that location is known as ''dereferencing'' the pointer. As an analogy, a page number in a book's index could be considered a pointer to the corresponding page; dereferencing such a pointer would be done by flipping to the page with the given page number and reading the text found on that page. The actual format and content of a pointer variable is dependent on the underlying computer architecture. Using pointers significantly improves performance for repetitive operations, like traversing iterable data structures (e.g. strings, lookup tables, control tables and tree structures). In particular, it is often much cheaper in time and space to copy and dereference pointers th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Delegation Pattern
In software engineering, the delegation pattern is an object-oriented design pattern that allows object composition to achieve the same code reuse as inheritance. In delegation, an object handles a request by delegating to a second object (the ''delegate''). The delegate is a helper object, but ''with the original context''. With language-level support for delegation, this is done implicitly by having self in the delegate refer to the original (sending) object, not the delegate (receiving object). In the delegate pattern, this is instead accomplished by explicitly passing the original object to the delegate, as an argument to a method. Note that "delegation" is often used loosely to refer to the distinct concept of forwarding, where the sending object simply uses the corresponding member on the receiving object, evaluated in the context of the ''receiving'' object, not the original object. Note that this article uses "sending object/receiving object" for the two objects, rather t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Handle (computing)
In computer programming, a handle is an abstract reference to a resource that is used when application software references blocks of memory or objects that are managed by another system like a database or an operating system. A resource handle can be an opaque identifier, in which case it is often an integer number (often an array index in an array or "table" that is used to manage that type of resource), or it can be a pointer that allows access to further information. Common resource handles include file descriptors, network sockets, database connections, process identifiers (PIDs), and job IDs. PIDs and job IDs are explicitly visible integers; while file descriptors and sockets (which are often implemented as a form of file descriptor) are represented as integers, they are typically considered opaque. In traditional implementations, file descriptors are indices into a (per-process) file descriptor table, thence a (system-wide) file table. Comparison to pointers While a p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Set-builder Notation
In set theory and its applications to logic, mathematics, and computer science, set-builder notation is a mathematical notation for describing a set by enumerating its elements, or stating the properties that its members must satisfy. Defining sets by properties is also known as set comprehension, set abstraction or as defining a set's intension. Sets defined by enumeration A set can be described directly by enumerating all of its elements between curly brackets, as in the following two examples: * \ is the set containing the four numbers 3, 7, 15, and 31, and nothing else. * \=\ is the set containing , , and , and nothing else (there is no order among the elements of a set). This is sometimes called the "roster method" for specifying a set. When it is desired to denote a set that contains elements from a regular sequence, an ellipses notation may be employed, as shown in the next examples: * \ is the set of integers between 1 and 100 inclusive. * \ is the set of natura ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Recursive Data Type
In computer programming languages, a recursive data type (also known as a recursively-defined, inductively-defined or inductive data type) is a data type for values that may contain other values of the same type. Data of recursive types are usually viewed as directed graphs. An important application of recursion in computer science is in defining dynamic data structures such as Lists and Trees. Recursive data structures can dynamically grow to an arbitrarily large size in response to runtime requirements; in contrast, a static array's size requirements must be set at compile time. Sometimes the term "inductive data type" is used for algebraic data types which are not necessarily recursive. Example An example is the list type, in Haskell: data List a = Nil , Cons a (List a) This indicates that a list of a's is either an empty list or a cons cell containing an 'a' (the "head" of the list) and another list (the "tail"). Another example is a similar singly linked type in Java ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
