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