A cyclic reference is established if object A holds a reference to B while B holds a reference to A.
A cyclic reference is established if object A holds a reference to B while B holds a reference to A. This exposes a dynamic problem ("hen-vs-egg"), for instance in a programming language, to create a cyclic reference, A and B must be known prior to establishing their inter-relationship. Thus a form of temporal sequence (delay) is needed if data structures are purely functional, for example by declaring the initialization of the references lazy. Cyclic references can also pose problems to garbage collection which needs to detect that none of two objects involved in a cyclic reference are reachable any more by the rest of the code.
