On Dec 30, 2011, at 12:44, Thomas David Rivers wrote: > > This frequently lulls C developers on MVS into believing the > runtime there checks for dereferencing NULL and does something > "meaningful" with it; or that, for example, strlen(NULL) returns > 0... but nope - it's just luck. > Actually, not entirely. It was mentioned on MVS-OE several years ago that many UNIX systems keep a 0 at location 00, and many C programmers have come to depend on this behavior, however incorrectly. IBM got weary of problem reports, "But it works on systems X, Y, and Z" that many library routines that used to report "Invalid Pointer" were modified to substitute "" for NULL and proceed accordingly.
-- gil
