From: utzoo!decvax!yale-com!brunix!mjb Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: Re: Questions about nil-pointer dereferences (the "plague") Article-I.D.: brunix.1241 Posted: Sat Jan 15 19:49:30 1983 Received: Tue Jan 18 19:03:06 1983 References: csu-cs.1979 I have never seen code that attempts to reference through a zero pointer and expects zero to be returned. By convention a pointer which is zero points to nothing (== NULL) and should not be used until it is assigned. I think this is perfectly reasonable, since any other value would be subject to the vagaries of pointer size, etc., and would be harder to test for. It is certainly *not* reasonable to expect a null pointer to point at anything predictable. mike braca {decvax,vax135}!brunix!mjb