Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!kim
From: kim@kim.misemi (Kim Letkeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Abandon NULL for (0)
Message-ID: <1005@kim.misemi>
Date: 23 Sep 89 14:55:58 GMT
References: <6502@ux.cs.man.ac.uk> <14718@bfmny0.UU.NET> <146@bbxsda.UUCP> <17505@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> <14678@haddock.ima.isc.com>
Organization: MITEL Corporation, Kanata, Ontario, Canada.
Lines: 20
In-reply-to: karl@haddock.ima.isc.com's message of 22 Sep 89 15:42:26 GMT

In article <14678@haddock.ima.isc.com> karl@haddock.ima.isc.com (Karl Heuer) writes:
>Despite which, there *are* good reasons for not doing it.  
>The word "NULL" has been conventionally used for decades 
>[...]
>In particular, if I were maintaining that code, I'd change the "(0)"'s 
>back to "NULL"'s as fast as I found them. 
>[...]

Finally, someone has addressed the most important issue with that
posting ... the fact that using "(0)" instead of "NULL" makes the
program harder to read and maintain. There are enough brackets (and
braces and ellipses) in the average program without adding more as a
superfluous replacement for a good convention. I also did not like the
original author's tendency to write the NULL first in a comparison
(e.g. if (NULL == some_ptr)) because this obscures the fact that the
pointer is the object of interest. The value for which you are
comparing is secondary (although important.)

-- 
Kim Letkeman    uunet!mitel!spock!kim