James Carlson wrote: > Stefan Teleman writes: >> >> Darren J Moffat wrote: >> >>>> The sad thing here is that it's really the bug-ridden application code >>>> that mishandles NULL pointers that's of poor quality, so it's not >>>> OpenSolaris's reputation that should be at stake. >>> Oh I agree completely but we are the odd one out here. >> I apologize for interjecting in this discussion, but, wouldn't the character >> string "(null)" or "(nichts)" or "<NULL>" being printed on stdout/stderr act >> as >> a clear indicator of the bug, and of its precise location ? > > Actually, no, it's not. You know its apparent location in the stdout > character stream, but nothing about where the problem might be in the > code.
In other words, the fact that i see "(null)" instead of some other printable value, printed out, provides me with absolutely no indication as to which char* pointer was NULL, in the sequence of arguments passed to printf(3C) and friends. That is because I do not have a reasonably defined set of expectations with respect to what *should* be the output of printf(3C) and friends. Speaking only for myself: when i see the string "(null)" printed out, when in fact i was expecting "Giraffe", i do not think "Oh, the stdout character stream contains the string \"(null\"). How odd. I wonder what could have caused this.". I think "Why is Giraffe NULL, when it shouldn't be ?". --Stefan -- Stefan Teleman Sun Microsystems, Inc. Stefan.Teleman at Sun.COM
