Manuel Bouyer wrote:

>On Sun, Mar 19, 2006 at 12:58:35PM +0000, Ben Harris wrote:
>  
>
>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 ...
>
>  
>
I'm resending this reply since postfix choked on it the first time I 
sent it.

my guess is more things would break, just think of all the code that does:
char * ptr;
ptr = NULL;
 
if (ptr)
   ...;

Of course good practice is to compare against NULL (as is documented in 
misc/style).

I was merely presenting it as a way to catch derefs of bad pointers at a 
more convenient time.  If I wrote code with this kind of bug I'd want it 
to crash sooner and give me a useful backtrace rather than later and 
possibly a misleading backtrace.

Even on ARM the early init to NULL would likely be better given it would 
at least die on the next page fault as Ben says it would.

Anyway, at this point I guess I just shouldn't have made the change.