Pointer alias

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In computer programming, a pointer alias is a pointer that references the same location or variable as another pointer. This can cause memory problems if a programmer releases the memory pointed to by one pointer, but does not handle all the other pointer aliases of that one pointer. Pointer aliasing in languages such as C programming disallow a compiler from optimizing otherwise optimizable code. This is not a problem in languages that don't traditionally have pointers such as Fortran, which is a reason given as to why the language is faster than C in numerical computations. Note that the latest standard of C, C99, introduces the concept of restrict pointer to overcome this problem.