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From: Ben Bacarisse <ben@bsb.me.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: question about nullptr
Date: Tue, 09 Jul 2024 10:21:56 +0100
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Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com> writes:

> On 2024-07-08, Ben Bacarisse <ben@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>> Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> On 08.07.2024 09:19, Kaz Kylheku wrote:
>>>> On 2024-07-07, Ben Bacarisse <ben@bsb.me.uk> wrote:
>>>>> I find myself completely out of step with many posters here about
>>>>> "explicit code" should look like.  I think
>>>>>
>>>>>   char *p = 0;
>>>>>
>>>>> is explicit enough and, in fact, I consider it a plus point if someone
>>>>> reading it goes "hey, what's going on here?" and ends up learning that 0
>>>>> is null pointer constant in C.
>>>> 
>>>> And if that person is on the C or C++ langauge committee, that bit of
>>>> learning could just prevent a superfluous non-invention like nullptr.
>>>
>>> What's superfluous to one is useful for others (e.g. for grep'ing
>>> occurrences of a null-pointer value in source codes);
>>
>> This is been suggested twice now but I'm struggling to see why that is
>> useful.  I can see management wanting one to find all uses of a null
>> pointer constant to check that they have all been replaced by the
>> "safer" nullptr, but what's the value in searching for nullptr?
>
> We could patch GCC to have a -Wnull-ptr-zero, which will give you a
> diagnostic for every occurrence of a zero valued integer expression that
> becomes a null pointer constant rather than an integer or floating-point
> value (and that isn't cast to pointer type).

Sure.

I once tried to persuade the compiler team where I worked to write a
"tool box" for diagnostics that would have a meta-language in which
users could describe the conditions that wanted to be diagnosed.  The
idea was half-baked so it never went anywhere.

-- 
Ben.