Manuel Bouyer wrote:

>On Sun, Mar 19, 2006 at 12:58:35PM +0000, Ben Harris wrote:
>  
>
>>In article <441D4EFD.1010507@omicron-persei-8.net> you write:
>>    
>>
>>>YAMAMOTO Takashi wrote:
>>>      
>>>
>>>>what i don't understand here is, why you think NULL initialization is
>>>>better wrt future bugs.
>>>> 
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>Would a dereference of the NULL ptr not cause immediate failure?
>>>      
>>>
>>Not necessarily.  On older ARM systems, the kernel has a page mapped at 
>>address zero containing the CPU vectors.  Reading through null pointers 
>>works fine, and writing corrupts the vector table, which you'll only 
>>find out about when you next take a page fault, interrupt or whatever.
>>    
>>
>
>Then maybe NULL should be defined to something else than 0 on those
>platforms ? I wonder how much things will break if we have NULL != 0
>though ...
>
>  
>
my guess is more things would break, just think of all the code that does:
char * ptr;
ptr = NULL;