Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!atanasoff!hascall
From: hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: calloc (actually NULL =?= 0)
Message-ID: <987@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 89 20:42:39 GMT
References: <22842@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <1428@auspex.auspex.com>
Reply-To: hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu (John Hascall)
Distribution: na
Organization: Iowa State Univ. Computation Center
Lines: 18

In article <1428@auspex.auspex.com> guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) writes:
>>According to Harbison + Steele's book, calloc returns a region of
>>memory with all bits set to zero. They also point out that pointers
 
>>I always thought a pointer consisting of zero bits is NULL. 
 
>Nope.  No such guarantee was ever made by any C language spec.

   What about the following taken from K&R, Appendix A, section 7.14,
   "Assignment operator":

       [talking about assigning ints to/from pointers
       being "a bad thing"] ...
       However, it is guaranteed that assignment of the
       constant 0 to a pointer will produce a null pointer...


 John Hascall / ISU Comp Center