My review of the C standard library in practice
> A null pointer legitimately and usefully points to a zero-sized object.I agree with many points from the article but strongly disagree with this one.It makes much more sense to treat a null pointer as an invalid, not present, object. Treating null pointer as an empty string (perhaps by expecting them first N pages to contain just \0 bytes, as various older Unix systems predating Linux did) feels like a recipe to hide bugs.For example, I want to distinguish the output from getenv of "the variable was found but has an empty value" from "the variable was not defined".If you have some random struct Foo, it's very clear that a null Foo pointer just means "no valid Foo value" and attempting to dereference it should crash (rather than optimistically return ~random data and naively continuing program execution, making bugs harder to detect).I expect any reasonable programmer would suggest treating a string (or array of any types) identically.