What does construction ^(int&) mean in c#?

Question

I found this construction with decompiler tool. Looks like it is something connected with multithreading. what does mean ^(int&) in c#?

upd

It used like variable declaration

^(int&) @someLock

Answer 1

This is invalid code, unsafe or not.

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Assumption: The person writing the decompiler comes from a C/C++ background and did not know how to construct legal C# code (if at all possible) for a construct found in IL.

If we're following the breadcrumbs of the "operators" involved, this could mean this:

@someLock is a variable that will hold the value at some place in memory ( & means it is actually an address, and ^ means we're dereferencing the address).

Basically, it could be "the value at some specific point in memory", crammed into a single variable declaration. Think of it as a variable that is placed specifically at some address. From knowledge (and I may absolutely be wrong here), IL can handle this, but C# cannot.

Answer 2

This is unsafe code. It returns pointer to memory address