Keith M Wesolowski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 15, 2006 at 08:42:29PM -0700, Andy Spitzer wrote:
>
> > I think that passing NULL to formatting functions for %s should not
> > crash, (ala glibc) as NULL is a perfectly legal value for a string.
> > It is the same as passing the results of 1.0 /0.0 to a %f. The
> > formating functions convert that to "Inf", why shouldn't they
> > convert NULL %s as "(NULL)" as well?
>
> Your analogy is flawed. NaN is a well-defined, valid floating-point
> non-quantity. If you were to take the address of such a value, the
> resulting pointer would likewise be valid, and dereferencing it would
> yield the expected result. Instead, the analog to NaN is the empty
> string (""), which contains nothing yet has a valid, well-defined
> address which can be dereferenced. NULL isn't a pointer to anything,
> and is therefore not an acceptable argument to a function which
> requires a pointer to *something*. To complete your analogy in the
> converse, passing NULL to a function which expects a float * is no
> more acceptable than passing NULL to a function which expects a char
> *, even if the former would happily accept a pointer to NaN.
This is not a valid analogy.
While you may do string operation on "", NaN is "not a number", so you cannot
use it (which looks similar to what "referencing" is for strings).
Jörg
--
EMail:[EMAIL PROTECTED] (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
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