minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow) (01/27/84)
This discussion seems to pop up once a year -- perhaps it could be put in net.announce and be done with. You shouldn't dereference NULL. But people do -- mostly by accident. As a slight debugging aid, the Decus C printf (and, I think, the V6 printf) test for printf("%s", NULL) and print "{null}". This at least keeps the bug from being fatal. Vax-11 C crashes the program which gets the bug out quicker, I suppose. (Actually, on Vax, the first 512 bytes of the user address space can't be referenced, so most instances of ((struct foo *) NULL)->bar are caught, too. Martin Minow decvax!minow