Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!hadley
From: hadley@ics.uci.edu (T.S. Hadley)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Referencing NULL pointers
Summary: How to cope?
Message-ID: <19367@paris.ics.uci.edu>
Date: 10 Jul 89 05:38:42 GMT
Sender: news@paris.ics.uci.edu
Reply-To: T.S. Hadley <hadley@icarus.ics.uci.edu>
Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards
Organization: University of California, Irvine - Dept of ICS
Lines: 31


   Greetings.

   By NULL pointer referencing I mean: consider the C frags:
      
      ..
      char	*s = (char *) 0, t[10];
      strcpy(t, s);
      ...
      /* or */
      ...
      TYPE	*t = (TYPE *) 0;	/* typedef struct { ... } TYPE; */
      if(t->field == 0)
      ...


   
   On my machine (sun) these statements causes segmentation violations
   during runtime.

   Apparantly, on other machines this is perfectly valid, since I see
   quite a lot of this in code created on certain non-sun machines.

   What can I do about it? Is there a flag on some C compiler to handle
   these situations? (gcc -fallow-null-pointer-referencing-idiocy :-) 

   Apologies if this subject is a dead horse.

   Grateful Thanks.
--
Tedd Hadley (hadley@ics.uci.edu)