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From: gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn )
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: A modest proposal
Message-ID: <6125@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 16-Jul-87 14:33:23 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.6125
Posted: Thu Jul 16 14:33:23 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jul-87 08:09:50 EDT
References: <1362@cullvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) )
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL), APG, MD.
Lines: 15

In article <1362@cullvax.UUCP> drw@cullvax.UUCP (Dale Worley) writes:
>What I propose is the NULL be made into a keyword of the language
>which acts like a constant and whose value is a pointer, and
>eliminating "0" as the null pointer.  As far as I know, no decently
>written C program will break on this, and it would clean a lot of
>cruft out of the language definition.

Although I agree with the intent, if 0 were not still guaranteed
to be equivalent to the null pointer, LOTS of existing applications
(for example, almost all of UNIX) would break.  Perhaps the best
approach would be to introduce NULL as a keyword, "deprecate" 0 for
null pointer (using other words, however), and hope that a future
revision of the C standard could remove the deprecated feature.
Unfortunately I suspect that you won't be able to persuade X3J11
that this is worth doing, but feel free to try.