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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: catering to bad code
Message-ID: <7690@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 23-Feb-87 17:23:28 EST
Article-I.D.: utzoo.7690
Posted: Mon Feb 23 17:23:28 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 23-Feb-87 17:23:28 EST
References: <14833@amdcad.UUCP> <554@aw.sei.cmu.edu.sei.cmu.edu> <975@unc.unc.UUCP>, <13755@sun.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 17

Ultimately, sometimes you just gotta be realistic about these things.  Yes,
it is a Good Thing to make location 0 nonexistent so that code which touches
it will drop dead.  This will point out a great many bugs, which should be
fixed.  However, that is little comfort if you are on a tight schedule and
the buggy code did somehow deliver the right answer.  The "*NULL == '\0'"
assumption is rather widespread, and it is often harmless, in the sense that
it doesn't usually result in wrong answers.  Making *NULL dump core is
the right thing to do in the long term, but it does have a serious short-
term impact on how soon you can ship the bloody system.  Expediency may
dictate providing some short-term workaround, like an optional ld flag
that makes *NULL work but logs the problem somewhere for later attention.

Note that you will be living with the problem *forever* unless you make
people go out of their way when they want *NULL, so don't make it the default.
-- 
Legalize			Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
freedom!			{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry