logoalt Hacker News

bluGilltoday at 1:00 PM1 replyview on HN

NULL exists on real CPUs. Maybe you meant nullptr which is a very different thing, don't confuse the two.


Replies

tialaramextoday at 3:25 PM

I don't agree. Null is an artefact of the type system and the type system evaporates at runtime. Even C's NULL macro just expands to zero which is defined in the type system as the null pointer.

Address zero exists in the CPU, but that's not the null pointer, that's an embarrassment if you happen to need to talk about address zero in a language where that has the same spelling as a null pointer because you can't say what you meant.

show 1 reply