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From: Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: question about nullptr
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2024 20:52:21 -0700
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Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> writes:

> Tim Rentsch <tr.17687@z991.linuxsc.com> writes:
>
>> Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> Hmm.  I like the idea of a type-agnostic way to express a "zero"
>>> value, [but] C's use of 0 for all scalar types strikes me more as
>>> an historical accident than a design feature.
>>
>> I don't think it was an accident at all.  It was chosen to be
>> consistent with how if(), while(), !, ?:, and so forth, all act.
>> There is a very consistent design philosophy there.  Sometimes
>> people who come from a strong Pascal background don't like it,
>> but personally I find the C model easier and more convenient to
>> work with than the Pascal model.
>
> In early C, int was in a very real sense the default type.  In B,
> types weren't even explicit, and IIRC variables were effectively "of
> type int", or more precisely a 16-bit PDP-11 word.  (I'm glossing
> over some details of B, many of which I don't know).  In that
> context 0 made sense as a general-purpose "zero" value.

My comment is not about the type but about the value.  That
the constant 0 happens to be of type int is irrelevant to
my conclusions.