Talk:Tombstone (programming)

Examples of use
Any well-known projects or libraries using this technique? &mdash; Vano 10:51, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

So what's the benefit?
This is a reasonable description, but a poor justification for tombstones because it merely begs the question.

Their stated benefit is this: "When the data is deallocated, the tombstone is set to a null (or, more generally, to a value that is illegal for a pointer in the given runtime environment), indicating that the variable no longer exists." If that were the reason to use tombstones, the same could be achieved more simply without them by just setting a pointer itself to null. No doubt tombstones have advantages, but this article doesn't explain them. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.211.106.253 (talk) 20:34, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Alternative definition
As I have always understood the term, it's the practice of putting in multiple extra logging statements (logging things like "A", "B", "C", etc) throughout a method as a means of tracing execution when interactive tracing and breakpoints are not available (as is often the case in embedded systems work).

Nsayer (talk) 19:33, 21 June 2024 (UTC)