faustus@ucbcad.UUCP (Wayne A. Christopher) (05/14/85)
Can anybody think of any problems with making "NULL" a part of the C language, specifically as a pointer to anything with a value of 0? As has been pointed out, it is a pain to have to remember to cast it all the time, and I tend to think of NULL as a pointer, not an integer. Perhaps then if anybody wanted to change NULL to be some other value, for instance if he wanted *NULL to be invalid, then the compiler could be changed to make NULL behave like 0 in things like "while (p)" which should mean "while (p != NULL)"... Wayne
gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (05/15/85)
> Can anybody think of any problems with making "NULL" a part of the C > language, specifically as a pointer to anything with a value of 0? As > has been pointed out, it is a pain to have to remember to cast it all > the time, and I tend to think of NULL as a pointer, not an integer. Pointer to WHAT???? That is the whole point (n.p.i.) of casting NULL when using it as an argument to a function. (You don't need to cast it for nearly any other use.) The ANSI solution to the general argument coercion issue will work for 0 just as well. Shouldn't this discussion be in net.lang.c (a.k.a. INFO-C)?