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0 pointsfc417fc8021mo ago0 comments

Arrays as glorified pointers were the mistake. Null terminated strings are a natural result of that design choice.

Null pointers however were not a mistake, despite how popular slandering them has become. A reasonable case can be made that any modern language should enforce null checks (and bound checks, and ...) or at the least provide them by default but that is neither here nor there as far as C is concerned.

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nine_k1mo ago

Tony Hoare himself called NULL a mistake. But the problem is not in the ability to set a pointer to a null value, of course. The problem is that all pointers are nullable, and there's no way to statically enforce their being non-null. I wonder how feasible data flow analysis would be in 1969 though.

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