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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: question about nullptr
Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2024 11:08:53 +0200
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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); if it's not
defined in a standard it gets explicitly defined individually, and
then likely in different (non-uniform, non-standard) ways.

To me it's more likely that because of that it had been deliberately
added to support such desires, and less likely that the C-standards
folks need to learn "C" and wouldn't know what 0 as a pointer value
would mean or that it has a clear semantic in such pointer contexts.

Janis