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.
Because of the way C/C++ uses pointers and arrays, you can reference an array element either by subscription or * (the unary dereference operator). int b[100]; // b is an array of 100 ints. int* p; // p is a a pointer to an int. p = b; // Assigns address of first element of b.