Path: utzoo!attcan!darkover!telly!druid!darcy
From: darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Is "if (!pointer)" as portable as "if (pointer == NULL)" ???
Keywords: portability, pointers, NULL
Message-ID: <1990Apr14.133625.24487@druid.uucp>
Date: 14 Apr 90 13:36:25 GMT
References: <656@hades.OZ> <1461@tkou02.enet.dec.com>
Reply-To: darcy@druid.UUCP (D'Arcy J.M. Cain)
Organization: D'Arcy Cain Consulting, West Hill, Ontario
Lines: 19

In article <1461@tkou02.enet.dec.com> diamond@tkou02.enet.dec.com (diamond@tkovoa) writes:
>In article <656@hades.OZ> greyham@hades.OZ (Greyham Stoney) writes:
> [...]
>>	if (buffer) free(buffer)
>
>This is also portable, and almost readable.  Again, to be really readable,
>you should still compare to NULL, but I grant that it would make your
>source code longer this time.
>
I know that NULL == 0 but I can't help feeling nervous about it.  I always
use something like "if (buffer == NULL)" and assume that the optimiser will
do the right thing.  Am I too paranoid or is this good defensive programming?


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