Castor oil is a vegetable oil derived from the castor bean seed in its purest form. It is colorless, odorless and tasteless.
Encoding globally available pointers helps protect them from being exploited. The EncodePointer function obfuscates the pointer value with a secret so that it cannot be predicted by an external agent. The secret used by EncodePointer is different for each process. A pointer must be decoded before it can be used.
Pointers are also used to hold the addresses of entry points for called subroutines in procedural programming and for run-time linking to dynamic link libraries (DLLs). In object-oriented programming, pointers to functions are used for binding methods, often using what are called virtual method tables. A pointer is a simple, more concrete implementation of the more abstract reference data type.