Re: [PATCH] Use NULL instead of integer 0 in security/selinux/

From: Timothy Miller
Date: Mon Jul 12 2004 - 09:54:26 EST




Denis Vlasenko wrote:
On Thursday 08 July 2004 19:52, Timothy Miller wrote:

Linus Torvalds wrote:

I've seen too damn many people mistake NULL and NUL (admit it, you've
seen it too), and I've seen code like

char c = NULL;

THIS is simply a case of the programmer not understanding what NULL
means. When I use '0' for a pointer, I know EXACTLY what I mean, and I
also know when '0' might be ambiguous, and when I don't know what I'm
allowed to do, then I play it REALLY safe and typecast 0 to exactly the
pointer type I need.


The question is, whether readers of your code (including compiler)
will be able to be sure that there is no error in

f(a,b,c,d,e,0,f,g,h);

statement or not. Better typecheck that 0.

This I agree with, definately. It's very important to make your code readable, and if it's not obvious from context, make it obvious. Cases like the above are one of the reasons I like languages like Verilog where you can pass parameters by specifying the parameter name.

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