pointer vs handles in C (are the terms used to convey separate things?)
Recently, I read a white paper by an individual who refers to a pointer to a struct as a handle. The author was clearly someone who had written C code on the windows platform previously. Googling indicates that windows programmers interact with system components via handles. I am wondering if it is common practice for windows programmers to refer to all struct pointers as handles? Or is the term handle meant to convey something beyond pointer to struct? I am asking as a linux C programmer.
The white paper I am referring to is: Duff, Heroux, and Pozo. An Overview of the Sparse Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms: The New Standard from the BLAS Technical Forum. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, Vol 28, No. 2, June 2002, Pages 239-267.
Answer
The term handle generally means some opaque value that has meaning only to the API which produced it. In Win32, the HANDLE type is either a pointer in kernel memory (which applications cannot access anyway) or an index into some kernel-internal array.