Applied Pokology: Applied Pokology – Interesting poke idiom: sparse tables

During tonight poke online office hours our friend hdzki
came with an interesting use case. He is poking at some
binary structures that are like sparse tables whose entries
are distributed in the file in an arbitrary way.

Each sparse table is characterized by an array of
consecutive non-NULL pointers. Each pointer points to an
entry in the table. The table entries can be anywhere in
the IO space, and are not necessarily consecutive, nor be in
order.

Source: Planet GNU